Real-time-aware reconfiguration decisions for dynamic software product lines

Abstract

Dynamic Software Product Lines (DSPL) have recently shown promising potentials as integrated engineering methodology for (self-)adaptive software systems. Based on the software-configuration principles of software product lines, DSPL additionally foster reconfiguration capabilities to continuously adapt software products to ever-changing environmental contexts. However, in most recent works concerned with finding near-optimal reconfiguration decisions, real-time aspects of reconfiguration processes are usually out of scope. In this paper, we present a model-based methodology for specifying and automatically analyzing real-time constraints of reconfiguration decisions in a feature-oriented and compositional way. Those real-time aware DSPL specifications are internally translated into timed automata, a well-founded formalism for real-time behaviors. This representation allows for formally reasoning about consistency and worst-case/best-case execution-time behaviors of sequences of reconfiguration decisions. The technique is implemented in a prototype tool and experimentally evaluated with respect to a set of case studies1.