Architectural Constraints in the Model-Driven Development of Self-Adaptive Applications

In component-based software development, a composition of connected components represents a software system's architecture. This component framework supports adaptation through application variability. The adaptation decision is made at runtime by resolving the variation points and computing the utility of all application variants. Following the application variability model, a huge number of application variants may arise, many of which are not feasible in reality. Architectural constraints may be applied to filter out such infeasible variants before checking their utilities. This article presents an approach to specify architectural constraints while following a model-driven development approach.