RAINBOW: Architecture-Based Adaptation of Complex Systems

Abstract : One increasingly important technique for improving software-based system integrity is providing systems with the ability to adapt themselves at run time to handle such things as resource variability, changing user needs, and system faults. Traditionally system self repair has been handled within the application, and at the code level. An alternative approach, and the approach taken under this effort, is to use architectural models, maintained at run time, as the basis for system reconfiguration and repair. An architecture can provide a global perspective on the system, enabling high-level interpretation of system problems. This in turn, allows one to better identify the source of the problem. Moreover, architectural models can make integrity constraints explicit, helping to ensure the validity of any system change. This effort demonstrated how to generalize architecture-based adaptation by making the choice of architectural style an explicit design parameter in the framework. This allows system designers to pick an appropriate architectural style to expose properties of interest, provide analytic leverage and map cleanly to existing implementations and middleware.