Architectural Artefacts for Autonomic Distributed Systems- Contract Language

In the last three years we have experimented using contracts as to enable the interoperability of distributed systems, with our main focus being autonomic systems. Starting with the definitions of contracts in the TM Forum´s NGOSS architecture, we have experimented with contracts from three different viewpoints: architecture, meta-model and implementation. This paper introduces the results of that work, which we term architectural artefacts for autonomic distributed systems (A³DS). We provide an overview of the architectural definitions, the designed meta-model and a more thorough discussion on practical terms such as the declarative contract language; and developed tools.