Component Substitution through Dynamic Reconfigurations

Component substitution has numerous practical applications and constitutes an active research topic. This paper proposes to enrich an existing component-based framework--a model with dynamic reconfigurations making the system evolve--with a new reconfiguration operation which "substitutes" components by other components, and to study its impact on sequences of dynamic reconfigurations. Firstly, we define substitutability constraints which ensure the component encapsulation while performing reconfigurations by component substitutions. Then, we integrate them into a substitutability-based simulation to take these substituting reconfigurations into account on sequences of dynamic reconfigurations. Thirdly, as this new relation being in general undecidable for infinite-state systems, we propose a semi-algorithm to check it on the fly. Finally, we report on experimentations using the B tools to show the feasibility of the developed approach, and to illustrate the paper's proposals on an example of the HTTP server.Comment: In Proceedings FESCA 2014, arXiv:1404.043

Quantitative prediction of quality attributes for component-based software architectures

+297hlm.;24c

Evaluation of static properties for component-based architectures

Early assessment of the non-functional properties of component compositions is one of the hottest issues in component-based architecting. We describe a method for evaluating the emergent static properties of an architecture, given the features of its constituents. The estimation framework is based on composition rules and the specification of the static properties of the components by means of a reflection interface. Two evaluation approaches, exhaustive and selective, provide a flexible trade-off between the estimation effort and the necessary precision. The method was successfully applied to the Koala component model for estimating the static memory consumption. 1