A graph transformation approach to software architecture reconfiguration

The ability of reconfiguring software architectures in order to adapt them to new requirements or a changing environment has been of growing interest. We propose a uniform algebraic approach that improves on previous formal work in the area due to the following characteristics. First, components are written in a high-level program design language with the usual notion of state. Second, the approach deals with typical problems such as guaranteeing that new components are introduced in the correct state (possibly transferred from the old components they replace) and that the resulting architecture conforms to certain structural constraints. Third, reconfigurations and computations are explicitly related by keeping them separate. This is because the approach provides a semantics to a given architecture through the algebraic construction of an equivalent program, whose computations can be mirrored at the architectural level.