A model-driven approach to performability analysis of dynamically reconfigurable component-based systems

Dynamic reconfiguration techniques appear promising to build component-based (C-B) systems for application domains that have strong adaptability requirements, like the mobile and the service-oriented computing domains. However, introducing dynamic reconfiguration features into a C-B application makes even more challenging the design and verification of functional and non functional requirements. Our goal is to support the model-based analysis of the effectiveness of reconfigurable C-B applications, with a focus on the assessment of the non-functional performance and reliability attributes. As a first step towards this end, we address the issue of selecting suitable analysis models for reconfigurable systems, suggesting to this end the use of joint performance and reliability (performability) models. Furthermore, we propose a model-driven approach to automatically transform a design model into an analysis model. For this purpose, we build on the existence of intermediate languages that have been proposed to facilitate this transformation and we extend one of them, to capture the core features (from a performance/reliability viewpoint) of a dynamically reconfigurable C-B system. Finally, we illustrate by a simple application example the main steps of the proposed approach.