Supporting Dynamic Software Architectures: From Architectural Description to Implementation

Dynamic software architectures are those that describe how components and connectors can be created, interconnected, and/or removed during system execution. Most existing architecture description languages (ADLs) provide a limited support to expressively describe these architectures and entail architectural mismatches and inconsistencies between architecture and implementation due to their decoupling from implementation. In this paper, we introduce the dynamic reconfiguration support provided by pi-ADL, a formal, well-founded theoretically language for describing dynamic software architectures under structural and behavioral viewpoints. pi-ADL provides architectural-level primitives for specifying programmed dynamic reconfigurations, i. e., foreseen changes described at design time and triggered at runtime. In addition, pi-ADL allows enacting dynamic reconfiguration by means of: (i) an exogenous approach, in which it is possible to control all elements of the software architectures and to apply the changes on the whole structure; and (ii) an endogenous approach, in which the architectural elements can manage dynamic reconfiguration actions. Furthermore, pi-ADL is integrated with the Go programming language, thus enabling to automatically generate implementation code from architectural descriptions, thus tackling the existing gap between them. We hereby use a real-world flood monitoring system as an illustrative example of how to describe dynamic software architectures in pi-ADL and automatically generate source code in Go.