Managing Architectural Reconfiguration at Runtime

Abstract

Managing dynamic reconfiguration of software systems is a tedious task in the software development because of the substantially increasing need for continuously available systems even at runtime. In particular, the software architecture of dynamically adaptive systems must continuously adapt to varying environmental conditions and user requirements. Therefore, they propose a wide range of possible configurations. The static enumeration of all the possible configurations is a difficult task. Moreover, not all dynamic reconfiguration operations can be foreseen at design time. Some reconfigurations may appear when the system is already deployed. In this context, we propose to combine the Architecture Description Languages and the Aspect-Oriented Software Development paradigm in order to make the dynamic reconfiguration process easier to design, understand and possible to validate. Also, this combination allows to easily evolving the reconfiguration policies even at runtime.