Reconfigurable service-based architecture based on variability description

Abstract

Self-adaptive systems evolve during system's execution against changes in operating environment. Such evolution and reconfiguration can be specified at architecture level using a syntactical expressive language such as Architecture Description Languages (ADLs). Variability modeling is an excellent instrument to model variations of software artifacts and their behavior within a self-adaptive system. However, existing ADLs that support dynamic reconfiguration do not explicitly model variation points on which the reconfiguration is based. This constitutes a barrier for a flexible management of reconfiguration at architecture level as well as traceability issues between a dynamic description given at architectural level and its counterpart at other abstraction levels. In this paper, we propose a variant-rich service-oriented ADL that enables system to reconfigure itself at runtime in response to a context change. To this end, our modular ADL, called Dynamic Service-Oriented Product Lines Architecture Description Language (DSOPL-ADL), specifies dynamic reconfigurations at architecture level besides specifying structural, variability and context information. Among several specified variable configurations at architecture level, one concrete configuration is generated at runtime triggered by a context value. Furthermore, an implementation code can be automatically generated from the architectural description.