A language for behavioural modelling of architectural patterns

Abstract

The complexity of interactions governing the coordination of loosely-coupled services, which forms the core of current software, brought behavioural issues up to the front of architectural concerns. This paper takes such a challenge seriously by lifting typical behaviour modelling techniques to the specification of both types and instances of architectural patterns in which the later ones are connected by ports that behave according to a water flow metaphor. A specific language is introduced for this purpose as well as a translator to mCRL2 so that the simulation and analysis techniques available in the corresponding toolset can be used to reason about (the behavioural layer of) software architectures. The approach is illustrated in a few examples.

On the verification of architectural reconfigurations

“…A pattern denes (architectural) elements (components and connectors) and might have associated constraints (see syntax in gure 3). For instance, pattern Ward denes elements Patient, Physician, Nurse, and Administration in listing 1 to represent congurations that carry out blood transfusions.…”

“…Design principles are specied as formulas in a modal logic, and then are veried against models of recongurations. For this, we extend an architectural description language (ADL) [2] called Archery [3,4], which is a domain specic language [5] used to animate, analyse and verify system's architectures. It is organized as a core and a number of modules.…”

“…Reconguration scripts are executed by a conguration manager when conditions, specied as constraints, hold. The language semantics is given by a translation into a process algebra [3], for the behavioural part, and by an encoding into bigraphical reactive systems [4], for the structural part. Constraints are translated into a modal logic and are veried against models derived from architectural specications [6,7,8].…”

Verifying Bigraphical Models of Architectural Reconfigurations

“…Such is the motivation for the ARCHERY language [2], [3]. Its basic specification concept is that of an architectural pattern, which comprises a set of architectural elements (connectors and components) specified by their behaviours and interfaces (set of ports).…”

“…Being essentially a short technical paper, the interested reader is referred to [2], [3] for further details and applications of the language.…”