Using Architectural Style as a Basis for Self-repair

Shang-Wen Cheng, David Garlan, Bradley Schmerl, Joćo Pedro Sousa, Bridget Spitznagel, and Peter Steenkiste

Software Architecture: System Design, Development, and Maintenance (Proceedings of the 3rd Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture) Jan Bosch, Morven Gentleman, Christine Hofmeister, Juha Kuusela (Eds), Kluwer Academic Publishers, August 25-31, 2002. pp. 45-59.

Online links: Postscript PDF

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.
Keywords
Dynamic adaptation, software architectures, performance analysis


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