Structuring and configuring distributed applications

An approach is described for designing configurable distributed applications. The main characteristics of this approach are: domain modeling where a domain model corresponds to an architecture for a family of systems, in which members of the family have some components in common and others that vary and the domain model captures the similarities and variations of the members of the family; target system generation where the architecture of the target system is generated from the domain model, based on the features (requirements) of the individual target system; and target system configuration when the instances of the target system components are generated and interconnected and the components are mapped onto a hardware configuration. The domain modeling approach models the application domain as a collection of concurrent objects that communicate by means of messages