Building Dynamic, Long-Running Systems

Abstract

Complex applications that are effectively systems-of-systems are becoming more common and moreuseful. Our goal is to devise new ways of architecting such systems that will make theirprogramming easier. We take a component oriented approach. A component's interface, which we callan outerface, includes not only the syntax of the component, but also its semantics and constraintson its use. Implementations of outerfaces are defined separately. Our underlying framework, TAIGA,lets the user code directly to the outerface and automatically finds, validates and binds anappropriate implementation. The framework handles component evolution and failure by detectedchanges and dynamically revalidating and rebinding possibly new implementations to existingouterfaces while maintaining the running system. We are currently working on extending thisframework to handle modern, distributed systems-of-systems.