Partial Validation of Configurations at Runtime

A system configuration is a set of configuration entities, their relations and the rules the system should obey. At runtime the configuration may be modified to meet new requirements, in response to performance degradations, or due to upgrade. Such modifications should maintain the consistency of the configuration to avoid any malfunction and service outage. Thus there is a need for runtime validation, which checks the modifications against the consistency rules of the system. This runtime validation should not only check the correctness of the modifications w.r.t. The consistency rules but it should also impose a minimal overhead especially in case of real-time and highly available systems. In this paper we introduce a partial validation approach for checking the system configuration consistency at runtime. Our approach is model based and uses UML profiles and OCL constraints.