Issues of Architectural Description Languages for Handling Dynamic Reconfiguration
This work identifies gaps in ADLs for software architects, but it is incremental as it reviews existing literature without proposing new solutions.
The paper investigates how four architectural description languages (ADLs) support dynamic reconfiguration in software systems, concluding that none adequately address consistency, behavior, or verification during reconfiguration.
Dynamic reconfiguration is the action of modifying a software system at runtime. Several works have been using architectural specification as the basis for dynamic reconfiguration. Indeed ADLs (architecture description languages) let architects describe the elements that could be reconfigured as well as the set of constraints to which the system must conform during reconfiguration. In this work, we investigate the ADL literature in order to illustrate how reconfiguration is supported in four well-known ADLs: pi-ADL, ACME, C2SADL and Dynamic Wright. From this review, we conclude that none of these ADLs: (i) addresses the issue of consistently reconfiguring both instances and types; (ii) takes into account the behaviour of architectural elements during reconfiguration; and (iii) provides support for assessing reconfiguration, e.g., verifying the transition against properties.