Architectural concepts and Design Patterns for behavior modeling and integration

Abstract

International audienceThe design of the control software for complex systems is a difficult task. It requires the modeling, the simulation, the integration and the adaptation of a multitude of interconnected entities and behaviors. To tackle this complexity, the approach proposed consists in combining architectural concepts, Design Patterns and object-oriented modeling with unified modeling language (UML). In this context, the present paper describes a modeling framework to take greater advantage of these concepts and to design flexible, intelligible control software. It proposes to objectify the behaviors, which leads to a two-level architecture based on three concepts: resources software images of the controlled system-behaviors applied to these resources, and meta-behaviors, i.e. means for behavior integration and adaptation. Two Design Patterns are proposed to describe how to specify behaviors and define the means to combine and adapt them. The first pattern, Polymorphic Behavior, provides the means to define new behaviors for a system and to plug them dynamically. The second one, Structured Behavior, provides the means to use finite state machines for behavior switching. The originality of the framework is that it defines concepts, a UML-based notation and heuristics which specifies how to apply these concepts. To illustrate the elements mentioned, this paper uses the control software of a walking robot as a running example

Towards Containment Checking of Behaviour in Architectural Patterns

“…The authors characterise architectural patterns as specialization of the object models. Perronne et al [Perronne et al 2006] describe a modelling framework consists of two design patterns to support behaviour specification of patterns. The first, polymorphic behaviour pattern provides the integration and the execution of new behaviours for a system.…”

“…The main idea of architectural patterns is to resolve the recurring design problems that arise in a specific context at the level of software architectures, including those related to helping in documentation of architectural design decisions, facilitating the communication between stakeholders through a common vocabulary, and describing the quality attributes of a software system . There have been many attempts at modelling the structure of architectural patterns [Gamma et al 1995;Shaw and Garlan 1996;Medvidovic and Taylor 2000;; however, only a very few studies have focused on behaviour modelling of patterns [Garlan et al 1994;Perronne et al 2006]. In practice, the most popular languages for modelling of architectural patterns and pattern variants in software design are various kinds of informal and semi-formal box-and-line diagrams [Rozanski and Woods 2005], the Unified Modelling Language (UML) [Group 2011b], Architecture Description Language (ADL) [Shaw and Garlan 1996;Medvidovic and Taylor 2000], and Domain Specific Language (DSL) [Mernik et al 2005].…”