Software Architectural Reflection Mechanism for Runtime Adaptation

A critical issue for software evolution on the fly is the adaptation of their runtime architecture. In fact, itpsilas hard to preserve service continuity and assure evolution process safety. To deal with this issue, we propose in this paper an approach to modify the runtime architecture indirectly thought meta-operators based on architectural reflection mechanism. We extend dynamic architecture description languages (ADLs) and consider the software architecture through two abstraction levels namely, from the more abstract one: the meta-level, and the base-level. Modifications to the meta-level will influent base-level through the reflection mechanism to achieve runtime evolution. Some existing tools can be used to check the correctness and safety of evolution operations before executing them in base-level.