Architectural Description of Dependable Software Systems

Architectural description languages (ADLs) are used within the software engineering community to support the description of high-level structure, or architecture, of software systems. A major advantage of this is the ability to analyze and evaluate trade-off among alternative solutions. This chapter will discuss the role of ADLs for representing and analyzing the architecture of software systems. Since ADLs vary considerably on the modeling aspects that they cover, we will focus our discussions on how ADLs support structuring dependability issues

Using Architectural Style as a Basis for System Self-repair

Abstract: An increasingly important requirement for software systems is the capability to adapt at run time in order to accommodate varying resources, system errors, and changing requirements. For such self-repairing systems, one of the hard problems is determining when a change is needed, and knowing what kind of adaptation is required. Recently several researchers have explored the possibility of using architectural models as a basis for run time monitoring, error detection, and repair. Each of these efforts, however, has demonstrated the feasibility of using architectural models in the context of a specific style. In this paper we show how to generalize these solutions by making architectural style a parameter in the monitoring/repair framework and its supporting infrastructure. The value of this generalization is that it allows one to tailor monitoring/repair mechanisms to match both the properties of interest (such as performance or security), and the available operators for run time adaptation. Key words: Dynamic adaptation, software architectures, performance analysis. 1