Modeling Change Patterns for Impact and Conflict Analysis in Event-Driven Architectures

Abstract

In distributed event-driven architectures, components are composed in a highly decoupled way, facilitating high flexibility, scalability and concurrency of distributed systems. However, the intrinsic loose coupling of its components make relations hard to identify making it challenging to analyze, maintain, and evolve an event-based architecture. For understanding the evolution of an event-based architecture, we require knowledge about its components' dependencies, which is often hard to gain due to the absence of explicit information about these dependencies. Furthermore, assisting techniques for analyzing the impacts of certain changes are missing, hindering the implementation of changes in event-driven architectures. We present in this paper a novel approach providing models to describe changes in event-based architectures on different levels of abstraction. The explicit definition of a change enables various types of analysis to increase the quality of the evolving event based systems architecture, like invalid access analysis, dangling actors analysis, change impact analysis, and dead actor analysis.