Bigraph specification of software architecture and evolution analysis in mobile computing environment

Abstract

Software system evolution is an active and important research topic in software engineering. In guiding software system evolution, software architecture plays a critical role. In the traditional software architecture, only the link information of components is considered, while the place information of components is usually neglected. However, due to the emerging mobile computing, pervasive computing, and intelligent computing, the place information is as important as the link information in the software architecture. Especially in mobile computing environments, the place changes often lead to changes in software configuration and functionality. In this paper, we study the Bigraph specification of software architecture and use it to describe both link and place information in detail. Based on Bigraph specification, we investigate the structural characteristics in the software architecture, and design checking algorithms for the component’s link exceptions and place exceptions. Furthermore, we address the well-evolved software architecture from a new perspective, which includes three basic evolution operation rules and their well-evolved conditions. We discuss the overall software architecture evolution through strong and weak bi-simulation in terms of software functionality. Finally, two case studies about software system in the evolution operation are presented, which illustrate the effectiveness of our approach.