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Managing variability of self‐customizable systems through composable components

2005; Wiley; Volume: 10; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1002/spip.214

1099-1670

Ioana Şora, Vladimir Creţu, Pierre Verbaeten, Yolande Berbers,

Model-Driven Software Engineering Techniques

Abstract Self‐customizable systems must adapt themselves to evolving user requirements or to their changing environment. One way to address this problem is through automatic component composition, systematically (re‐)building systems according to the current requirements by composing reusable components. Our work addresses requirements‐driven composition of multi‐flow architectures. This article presents the central element of our automated runtime customization approach, the concept of composable components: the internal configuration of a composable component is not fixed, but is variable in the limits of its structural constraints. In this article, we introduce the mechanism of structural constraints as a way of managing the variability of customizable systems. Composition is performed in a top–down stepwise refinement manner, while recursively composing the internal structures of the composable components according to external requirements over the invariant structural constraints. The final section of the article presents our cases of practical validation. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.