An Automated Formal Approach to Managing Dynamic Reconfiguration

Dynamic reconfiguration is the process of making changes to software at run-time. The motivation for this is typically to facilitate adaptive systems which change their behavior in response to changes in their operating environment or to allow systems with a requirement for continuous service to evolve uninterrupted. To enable development of reconfigurable applications, we have developed OpenRec, a framework which comprises a reflective component model plus an open and extensible reconfiguration management infrastructure. Recently we have extended OpenRec to verify whether an intended (re)configuration would result in an application's structural constraints being satisfied. Consequently OpenRec can automatically veto proposed changes that would violate configuration constraints. This functionality has been realized by integrating OpenRec with the ALLOY Analyzer tool via a service-oriented architecture. ALLOY is a formal modelling notation which can be used to specify systems and associated constraints. In this paper, we present an overview of the OpenRec framework. In addition, we describe the application of ALLOY to modelling re-configurable component based systems and highlight some interesting experiences with integrating OpenRec and the ALLOY Analyzer