Fancy Some Chips for Your TeaStore? Modeling the Control of an Adaptable Discrete System

TL;DR

This paper introduces Chips, a modeling language combining control theory and programming concepts, to design and analyze complex, resource-dependent web applications like the adaptable TeaStore system.

Contribution

The paper presents Chips, a novel language for modeling complex systems with interdependent components, facilitating systematic design and robustness analysis.

Findings

Chips enables systematic modeling of complex resource-dependent systems.

Application to the TeaStore demonstrates its practical utility.

Supports robustness analysis of component-based models.

Abstract

When designing new web applications, developers must cope with different kinds of constraints relative to the resources they rely on: software, hardware, network, online micro-services, or any combination of the mentioned entities. Together, these entities form a complex system of communicating interdependent processes, physical or logical. It is very desirable that such system ensures its robustness to provide a good quality of service. In this paper we introduce Chips, a language that aims at facilitating the design of models made of various entwined components. It allows the description of applications in the form of functional blocks. Chips mixes notions from control theory and general purpose programming languages to generate robust component-based models. This paper presents how to use Chips to systematically design, model and analyse a complex system project, using a variation of the Adaptable TeaStore application as running example.