A Model-Based Architecture Supporting Virtual Organizations in Pervasive Systems

Modern distributed computer systems, with mobile and embedded devices as first class citizens, are formed from heterogeneous platforms. Owing to their distributed nature, dynamic reconfiguration and adaptation are reflecting different ownerships and administration domains of devices and applications. A portable, plug-in extensible runtime architecture is presented that explicitly honors ownership and realm of control of hardware devices, resources and application components. Based on such an architecture, their owners, while pursuing their very own business models, can cooperatively form Virtual Organizations (VO) to run applications defined by model-based software components (MBSC), consisting of a set of high-level models that are directly interpreted by this architecture's runtime nodes.