Issues of Architectural Description Languages for Handling Dynamic Reconfiguration

TL;DR

This paper reviews how four well-known ADLs support dynamic reconfiguration, highlighting significant gaps such as lack of consistency, behavioral consideration, and verification support during reconfiguration.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of ADLs regarding dynamic reconfiguration and identifies key limitations in current approaches.

Findings

None of the ADLs support consistent reconfiguration of instances and types.

Current ADLs do not consider the behavior of architectural elements during reconfiguration.

There is a lack of verification support for reconfiguration transitions in existing ADLs.

Abstract

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.