Automated runtime management of embedded service systems based on design-time modeling and model transformation

The management of distributed and embedded service systems is a complex task as the services are exposed to changing environments which have to be reflected by the services' configurations. These configurations are commonly based on abstract management policies. Embedded devices usually lack the resources to perform the necessary computations to derive an actual configuration from an abstract policy. Thus we developed a two phase management approach that splits up the management process into a design-time and a runtime task. At design-time a model of the managed system is created. This model is augmented by high-level, environment-aware management policies that are automatically refined to low-level service configurations using graph-transformation techniques. This phase is based on the concepts of model-based management and on parts of the generalized role based access control model to handle the modeling of the environment-aware policies. The runtime phase covers the enforcement of the environment-aware management policies by a set of management services responsible for the setting of suitable service configurations.