Achieving Dependable Component Bindings in Dynamic Adaptive Systems - A Runtime Testing Approach

Component-based software engineering has been continuously improved and successfully applied over the past years. Future systems, like ultra-large scale systems, are a vast array of decentralized, distributed, autonomic, heterogeneous, organically grown and continually evolving subsystems respectively components. Components may join or leave these systems during the life cycle of these systems, even at runtime. Despite this enormous complexity, we depend more and more on these dynamic adaptive systems. Hence we have to care about dependability although the systems are evolving at runtime. To achieve dependable dynamic adaptive systems which support hot plug and binding of components during runtime we claim to integrate specific concepts, like runtime testing, into the component infrastructure. In this paper we will show that existing approaches cannot guarantee the correctness of component bindings in dynamic adaptive systems. Therefore we introduce a technique for runtime testing and show how it can be integrated into a component-based approach.