A scalable approach to the design of SW architectures with dynamically created/destroyed components

Abstract

The architecture of component based software systems is classified as being static or dynamic, depending on whether the component number and the component connections are fixed a priori or can change at run time. Most work in the field of formal method based architectural description languages has focused on static architectures, as well as dynamic architectures where the architectural specification does not scale with respect to the components that can be created or destroyed at run time. In this paper we start from PADL, a graphical, hierarchical, process algebra based language for the description of static software architectures. We then enrich its syntax and semantics in order to provide scalable specifications of software architectures where some components are dynamically created and destroyed. We show that the construction of the new language allows the architectural checks developed for PADL to be reused for the detection of architectural mismatches in the description of dynamic software architectures.