Description and Verification of Dynamic Software Architectures for Distributed Systems

Abstract

Continuing growth and increasing complexity of distributed software systems make them be more flexible, adaptive and easily extensible. Dynamic evolution or reconfiguration of distributed software systems is one possible solution to meet these demands. However, there are some challenges for building dynamically evolving distributed software systems at runtime, where dynamic software architectures for them is one of the most crucial problems. In this paper, we proposed a formal method of describing and verifying dynamic software architectures for distributed systems using hypergraph grammars. We firstly gave out reconfiguration production rules and operations for software architectures based on hypergraph grammars, and then described dynamic reconfiguration of software architectures for distributed systems according to those rules. At last we verified the invariant property of dynamic software architectures for those systems using model checking, and gave out corresponding verification algorithms.