A model for dynamic reconfiguration in service-oriented architectures

The importance of modelling the dynamic characteristics of the architecture of software systems has long been recognised. However, the nature of the dynamics of service-oriented applications goes beyond what is currently addressed by architecture description languages (ADLs). At the heart of the service-oriented approach is the logical separation between the service need and the need-fulfillment mechanism, i.e., the provision of the service: the binding between the requester and the provider is deferred to run time and established at the instance level, i.e., each time the need for the service arises. As a consequence, computation in the context of service-oriented architectures transforms not only the states of the components that implement applications but also the configurations of those applications. In this paper, we present a model for dynamic reconfiguration that is general enough to support the definition of ADLs that are able to address the full dynamics of service-oriented applications. As an instance of the model, we present a simple service-oriented ADL derived from the modelling language srml that we developed in the Sensoria project.