QoS contract preservation through dynamic reconfiguration: A formal semantics approach

Gabriel Tamura, Rubby Casallas, Anthony Cleve, Laurence Duchien

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

The increasing pervasiveness of computing services in everyday life, combined with the dynamic nature of their execution contexts, constitutes a major challenge in guaranteeing theexpected quality of such services at runtime. Quality of Service (QoS) contracts have been proposed to specify expected quality levels (QoS levels) on different context conditions, with different enforcing mechanisms. In this paper we present a definition for QoS contracts as a high-level policy for governing the behavior of software systems that self-adapt at runtime in response to context changes. To realize this contract definition, we specify its formal semantics and implement it in a software framework able to execute and reconfigure software applications, in order to maintain fulfilled their associated QoS contracts. The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, we extend typed-attributed graph transformation systems and finite-state machines, and use them as denotations to specify the semantics of QoS contracts. Second, this semantics makes it possible to systematically exploit design patterns at runtime by dynamically deploying them in the managed software applicaion. Third, our semantics guarantees self-adaptive properties suchas reliability and robustness in the contract satisfaction. Finally, we evaluate the applicability of our semantics implementation by integrating and executing it in FraSCAti, amulti-scale component-based middleware, in three case studies.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)307-332
Number of pages26
JournalScience of Computer Programming
Volume94
Issue numberP3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2014

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  • Evolution: Evolution

    Cleve, A. (PI)

    1/01/1031/01/10

    Project: Research Axis

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