Automated Management of Dynamic Component Dependency for Runtime System Reconfiguration

Runtime reconfigurations of component-based systems must be undertaken with careful considerations of dependency between components. The safer and less disruptive a reconfiguration strategy is, the more accurate dependency information it needs. This paper proposes to manage dynamic dependency between components with mealy machine automatically derived from the implementation of components. To maintain the current dependency information for a component at runtime, the corresponding machine is instrumented into the component implementation in such a way that it is always synchronized with the execution of the component. We implemented a prototypical tool for this approach and evaluated it with a realistic benchmark application. The results show that our approach achieves a high accuracy and keeps low overheads without introducing any manual work.