Rule-based strategic reflection: observing and modifying behaviour at the architectural level

Cazzola, Walter; Savigni, Andrea; Sosio, Andrea; Tisato, Francesco

doi:10.1109/ase.1999.802308

Cited by 17 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 4 publications

(4 reference statements)

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“…However, the principles of computational reflection are also applicable to programming-in-the-large, which represents the complex self-adaptive software systems we are interested in our research [Andersson et al 2009b]. In fact, numerous previously developed self-adaptation approaches (e.g., [Cazzola et al 1999;Tisato et al 2001;Blair et al 2004]) are based on the principles of reflection. Figure 1 provides an overview of the FORMS's primitives and their relationships to the reflection perspective.…”

Section: Reflection Perspectivementioning

confidence: 99%

Forms

Weyns

Malek

Andersson

2012

ACM Trans. Auton. Adapt. Syst.

141

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The challenges of pervasive and mobile computing environments, which are highly dynamic and unpredictable, have motivated the development of self-adaptive software systems. Although noteworthy successes have been achieved on many fronts, the construction of such systems remains significantly more challenging than traditional systems. We argue this is partially because researchers and practitioners have been struggling with the lack of a precise vocabulary for describing and reasoning about the key architectural characteristics of self-adaptive systems. Further exacerbating the situation is the fact that existing frameworks and guidelines do not provide an encompassing perspective of the different types of concerns in this setting. In this paper, we present a comprehensive reference model, entitled FOrmal Reference Model for Self-adaptation (FORMS), that targets both issues. FORMS provides rigor in the manner such systems can be described and reasoned about. It consists of a small number of formally specified modeling elements that correspond to the key concerns in the design of self-adaptive software systems, and a set of relationships that guide their composition. We demonstrate FORMS's ability to precisely describe and reason about the architectural characteristics of distributed self-adaptive software systems through its application to several existing systems. FORMS's expressive power gives it a potential for documenting reusable architectural solutions (e.g., architectural patterns) to commonly encountered problems in this area.

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Section: Reflection Perspectivementioning

confidence: 99%

Forms

Weyns

Malek

Andersson

2012

ACM Trans. Auton. Adapt. Syst.

141

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“…The system we consider in this short overview are UML virtual machine [17], The K-Component Architecture [10], Architectural Reflection [7] and design enforcement [19].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Cazzola et al [7] have presented a novel approach to reflection called architectural reflection which allows dynamic adaptation of a system through its design information. This has been possible moving the system software architecture from design-time to run-time.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Software Evolution through Dynamic Adaptation of Its OO Design

Cazzola

Ghoneim

Saake

2004

Objects, Agents, and Features

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Abstract. In this paper we present a proposal for safely evolving a software system against run-time changes. This proposal is based on a reflective architecture which provides objects with the ability of dynamically changing their behavior by using their design information. The meta-level system of the proposed architecture supervises the evolution of the software system to be adapted that runs as the base-level system of the reflective architecture. The meta-level system is composed of cooperating components; these components carry out the evolution against sudden and unexpected environmental changes on a reification of the design information (e.g., object models, scenarios and statecharts) of the system to be adapted. The evolution takes place in two steps: first a meta-object, called evolutionary meta-object, plans a possible evolution against the detected event then another meta-object, called consistency checker meta-object validates the feasibility of the proposed plan before really evolving the system. Meta-objects use the system design information to govern the evolution of the base-level system. Moreover, we show our architecture at work on a case study.

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“…object-oriented systems (Cazzola, 1998), software architectures (Cazzola et al, 1999a), or dynamic petri nets (Capra & Cazzola, 2009), among others.…”

Section: Computational Reflectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Cazzola et al (Cazzola et al, 1999), (Cazzola et al, 1999a) were one of the first authors to propose a reflective framework to address the reconfiguration of software architectures. They introduced the term Architectural Reflection as -the computation performed by a system about its own software architecture‖.…”

Section: Top-down Approaches: Self-adaptive Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dynamic Evolution and Reconfiguration of Software Architectures Through Aspects

Cubel

Benedí

Costa-Soria

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Change is an intrinsic property of software. A software system, during its lifetime, may require several updates, improvements, or new features. If these change requirements are not addressed, the risk of becoming a useless system increases. In fact, this is a challenging issue of safety-and mission-critical software systems, which cannot be stopped to perform maintenance or evolution operations due to their continuous operation. To reduce the aging of these critical systems, they must be provided with mechanisms enabling their dynamic evolution, i.e. the support of changes on their structure and behaviour while they remain in operation.This thesis is concerned with the design of a framework to build architecturebased, dynamically evolvable, software systems. The fact that this framework is a software architecture based approach provides the following advantages: (i) it offers a high-level of abstraction for describing dynamic changes; (ii) it allows varying the level of system description; and (iii) it advantages from the existing support for system modelling, code-generation, and formal analysis provided by architecture description languages.The framework presented in this thesis, called Dynamic PRISMA, is characterized by the combination of two levels of dynamism: Dynamic Reconfiguration, which addresses changes at the configuration level (i.e. the architectural configuration), and Dynamic Type Evolution, which addresses changes at the type-level (i.e. the specification of architectural types and instances). This combination is one of the major contributions of this thesis: thus a system is not only able to reconfigure at runtime the building blocks it is composed of (i.e. architectural types), but also to redefine these building blocks (or introduce new ones) at runtime.Another contribution of the thesis is the identification of the concerns related to dynamic evolution and their integration in the framework through aspects. This improves the separation of concerns and allows us to change reconfiguration specifications, evolution mechanisms, or the business logic independently of each other.A third contribution of this thesis is how this dynamism is supported: reconfiguration through autonomic capabilities, which provides proactivity according to either internal or external stimuli; and type evolution through asynchronous reflection, which enables the modification of a type specification and the transformation of their instances at different rates (i.e. when they are ready for evolution). Specifically, the asynchronous evolution vi semantics is precisely described by means of graph transformations. This formalism has been chosen because it naturally models both the system architecture and its asynchronous evolution.The work presented in this thesis is illustrated through a case study from the robotics domain; an area which could potentially benefit from the results of this thesis. KEYWORDSsoftware architectures, dynamic evolution, dynamic reconfiguration, dynamic type evolution, dynamic instance evol...

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Rule-based strategic reflection: observing and modifying behaviour at the architectural level

Cited by 17 publications

References 4 publications

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Software Evolution through Dynamic Adaptation of Its OO Design

Dynamic Evolution and Reconfiguration of Software Architectures Through Aspects

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