State Transfer Management in Adaptive Software: An Approach from Design to Runtime

Abstract

Dynamic adaptation of software is the change in the structure or behavior of the software at runtime without stopping whole system. In component-based adaptive software, an adaptation process includes actions such as stopping and removing components, adding and starting component, etc. A challenge when realizing the adaptation process is to ensure the system consistency. One of the system consistency aspects, the state of the system must be guaranteed. The maintenance of state is a challenge when reconfiguring the system, specially the inhomogeneity of system versions before and after adaptation. To cope with this challenge, some approaches use state transfer functions which are manually implemented to realize the state transfer. However, they are ad-hoc approaches. They do not offer a general solution to transfer state in the adaptive system which can be applied from design time to runtime in the development process. Therefore, we propose an approach based on a state transfer model that is specified at design time and used at runtime during adaptation process for transferring state.