Towards Adaptable Middleware to Support Service Delivery Validation in i-DSML Execution Engines

A developing paradigm in the area of Software Engineering is that of Model Driven Development where models are used to express operations that are thereafter interpreted and executed through the use of an execution engine. The high level of abstraction within these models present inherent challenges in guaranteeing operation that respect policies and other constraints during execution. Additionally, the domain specificity necessarily present within these execution engines make them rigid and not suited for repurposing across different domains. We propose to address these issues through the use of a middleware architecture that is responsible for the service delivery aspect of the execution engine. Our architecture will provide a separation of domain specific and domain independent concerns, resulting in a set of domain specific artifacts which possess domain knowledge, and a generalized execution platform that inherits its operations from the domain artifacts. Our design facilitates the realization of user intent through the generation, validation and execution of adaptation models at runtime constrained by policies. We show the viability of this approach in the User-Centric Communication Middleware, a layer of the Communication Virtual Machine, which is responsible for enforcing communication requirements.