On the verification of architectural reconfigurations

Abstract

In a recongurable system, the response to contextual or internal change may trigger reconguration events which, on their turn, activate scripts that change the system's architecture at runtime. To be safe, however, such recongurations are expected to obey the fundamental principles originally specied by its architect. This paper introduces an approach to ensure that such principles are observed along recongurations by verifying them against concrete specications in a suitable logic. Architectures, reconguration scripts, and principles are specied in Archery, an architectural description language with formal semantics. Principles are encoded as constraints, which become formulas of a two-layer graded hybrid logic, where the upper layer restricts recongurations, and the lower layer constrains the resulting congurations. Constraints are veried by translating them into logic formulas, which are interpreted over models derived from Archery specications of architectures and recongurations. Suitable notions of bisimulation and renement, to which the architect may resort to compare congurations, are given, and their relationship with modal validity, is discussed.

Checking Properties along Multiple Reconfiguration Paths for Component-Based Systems

“…As mentioned in the introduction, our method takes place at design-time. We do not deal with a language to describe reconfiguration operations and constraints on these operations as an extension of an ADL, as in [25], we are mainly interested in developing effective methods for verifying properties. In [14] we were able to deal with a particular case of infinite paths, based on the fact that often the same sequences are repeated: a component may be stopped in some circumstances, restarted in some circumstances, and so on.…”

“…Dynamic reconfigurations of software architectures are active research topics [1,3,5,19,20,21,18,25]. They provide large increase in value for component-based software.…”