Toward an Analysis Method of Software Evolution Triggered by Place Change in Mobile Computing

Software dynamic evolution is a hot topic in software engineering. Traditional evolution is caused by the change in user requirements and running environments. However, in mobile computing systems, there is a new problem that place change leads to the change in software configuration, deployment, and function, which is called the problem of software evolution triggered by place change. Facing this new problem, traditional evolution methods fail to formally describe their evolution process and analyze their evolution performance. Therefore, a new method needs to be developed to ensure the reliability of software evolution triggered by place change. We first address various situations regarding the change of the software function caused by place change in physical space, which are described by a Bigraph model. Then, the triggering conditions for software evolution are defined, and a reaction system corresponding to software evolution is discussed. A theory about software function change caused by place change is developed, including a novel algorithm for identifying software evolution rules that involve place information and the control process for the whole software evolution (CPSE) in a mobile computing environment. Finally, some real case studies illustrate the effectiveness and correctness of our proposed method. Extensive experiments show that our algorithm CPSE outperforms Quiescence and version consistency (VC)-concurrent versions (CV) algorithms in timeliness and average disruption.