Tolerating Architectural Mismatches

The integrity of complex software systems built from existing components is becoming more dependent on the integrity of the mechanisms used to interconnect these components, in particular, on the ability of these mechanisms to cope with architectural mismatches that might exist between components. This paper is based on the assumption that architectural mismatches always exist in such systems, so the need to handle them in run-time. When developing complex software systems, the problem is not only to identify the appropriate components, but also to make sure that these components are interconnected in a way that allows mismatches to be tolerated. The resulting architectural solution should be a system based on existing components, which are independent in their nature, but are able to interact in wellunderstood ways. To find a solution to this problem we apply general principles of fault tolerance in the context of dealing with architectural mismatches