An Approach to Reliable Software Architectures Evolution

Abstract

In recent years, reliability is becoming a more and more important concern for software architectures. There exist many reliability model to predict the software reliability at architecture level, but few of them give the formal description of the software architecture. Although many formal approaches have been proposed to specify the software architecture, unfortunately, few of them pay attention to the important non-functional characteristic, namely reliability here. In this paper, we try to bridge the gap between software reliability model and software architecture description. Our work expands such idea in four directions. First, we propose a reliable hypergraph grammar by extending hyperedge. Then we describe the architecture structure by using our reliable hypergraph grammar. Meanwhile, through this reliable hypergraph grammar, architecture evolution is achieved by applying predefined transformation rules. At last, we use a case study to illustrate how our approach works.