Autotuning control structures for reliability-driven dynamic binding

This paper explores a formally grounded approach to solve the problem of dynamic binding in service-oriented software architecture. Dynamic binding is a widely adopted mean to automatically bind exposed software interfaces to actual implementations. The execution of an operation on one or another implementation, though providing the same result, could turn out in different quality of service, e.g. due to failure occurrence. Dynamic binding is thus of primary importance to achieve what in the Software Engineering domain is called “self-adaptiveness”, the capability to preserve a desired quality of service, if this is feasible. It is important to reach this goal also in the presence of environmental fluctuations - a route congestion increase - or even abrupt variations - a server breakdown. A quite general dynamic binding problem is here reformulated as a discrete-time feedback control one, and the use of autotuning techniques is discussed, extending previous research, in a view to guaranteeing the desired quality of service without the need for computationally-intensive optimisations.