A multi-scale modeling approach for software architecture deployment

Abstract

For large component-based applications, identifying a valid deployment architecture has emerged as a major challenge. Actually, this deployment architecture (i.e., allocation of software components to its hardware hosts) should satisfy various constraints related to the software components and the target environment such as the hierarchical description of components, their connections and the resource constraints. The numerous constraints make hard to construct manually the correct deployment architecture. In this work, we propose a formal method based on a formal language called BRS (Bigraphical Reactive System) in order to guarantee the correctness of the deployment architecture. Furthermore, in order to support its automatic construction, our proposed method follows a multi-scale modeling. In fact, the designer starts by modeling the first scale architecture which is refined automatically by successively adding smaller scale components until obtaining the deployment architecture at the last scale. This refinement is ensured by applying a set of rules. In this paper, we address communicating systems as a study domain.