Contracts for evolving systems

In this work we address evolving systems, which are basically collaborative and distributed systems building up a larger scale system of system (SoS). These systems are able to adapt the current architecture to some changes in the environment. Constituent systems of a SoS, which represent the basic elements of our modeling approach, operate with different degrees of freedom and as a result the self-adaptation and cooperation between a set of constituent systems is driven by local needs. Based on our former work [11], we propose a well-defined modelling approach for SoS capturing both static and dynamic aspects. The aim is to address on the one hand the required flexibility to adapt the systems during run-time, and on the other hand to guarantee that the SoS reacts still in a safe manner. For this, we will use the contract paradigm for both the specification of legal configurations of the SoS, and to specify the dynamicity model, describing how the SoS architecture can change during run-time. Further, we depict how to adapt a system level analysis technique in order to check the dynamicity model against the invariants of the SoS. With this, we are able to determine, whether the SoS can reach some critical configurations. This enables us to modify the dynamicity model in an adequate manner.