Dynamic accommodation of change: automated architecture configuration of distributed systems

A major challenge in developing and coordinating distributed agents is to accommodate changes introduced at one agent and to propagate it to every other interested party. This presents a special difficulty if the information maintained in a node is highly structured. Examples of such problems are dynamic accommodation of structural changes in distributed software systems or consistency management of multiple viewpoints in typical multiple perspectives/stakeholders settings: modifications or changes not envisaged at “design time” have to be handled at run time without disturbing those parts of the system unaffected by the change. The key feature realizing such dynamic modifications and extensions is a clean separation between internal operations or actions of an individual node or agent and their structural coordination. Thus, general change rules for creation/deletion and connection/disconnection of nodes/agents can be formulated. We consider as an important problem area, dynamic change management of distributed systems. We propose to use distributed graph transformation as the underlying formalism to realize both the specification of evolving distributed systems as well as dynamic change management, thus taking a step towards building configurable distributed systems. The results obtained can easily be transferred to the field of consistency management