Modeling and Verification of Reconfigurable Actor Families

Software product line engineering enables proactive reuse among a set of related products through explicit modeling of commonalities and differences among them.Features are usually used to distinguish different products as a product is identified by its supported feature set that is represented by a configuration. Dynamic product lines enhance flexibility of a product by allowing run-time reconfiguration. In this paper, we focus on modeling and verification of families of concurrent and distributed systems that are reconfigurable. To this end, we introduce the notion of variability in actor models to achieve family of reconfigurable actors. Then, we present our methodology to model this concept using the actor-based modeling language Rebeca. The model checking backbone of Rebeca enables us to ensure establishment of certain constraints on reconfigurations. We show the applicability and effectiveness of our approach by applying it on a set of case studies.