On Activation, Connection, and Behavior in Dynamic Architectures

The architecture of a system describes the system’s overall organization into components and connections between those components. With the emergence of mobile computing, dynamic architectures became increasingly important. In such architectures, components may appear or disappear, and connections may change over time. Despite the growing importance of dynamic architectures, the specification of properties for those architectures remains a challenge. To address this problem, we introduce the notion of configuration traces to model properties of dynamic architectures. Then, we characterize activation, connection, and behavior properties as special sets of configuration traces. We then show soundness and relative completeness of our characterization, i.e., we show that the intersection of an activation, connection, and behavior property contains all relevant configuration traces and that (almost) every property can be separated into these classes. Configuration traces can be used to specify general properties of dynamic architectures and the separation into different classes provides a systematic way for their specification. To evaluate our approach we apply it to the specification and verification of the Blackboard architecture pattern.