Modelling Dynamic Software Architectures using Typed Graph Grammars

Several recent research efforts have focused on the dynamic aspects of software architectures providing suitable models and techniques for handling the run-time modification of the structure of a system. A large number of heterogeneous proposals for addressing dynamic architectures at many different levels of abstraction have been provided, such as programmable, ad-hoc, self-healing and self-repairing among others. It is then important to have a clear picture of the relations among these proposals by formulating them into a uniform framework. Our work is a contribution in this line. In particular, we map several notions of dynamicity into the same formal framework (i.e. typed graph grammar) in order to distill the similarities and differences among them. As a result we provide a characterization of different styles of architectural dynamisms in term of graph grammars with the purpose to understand the kinds of properties that can be naturally associated to such different specification styles and we describe them over a simple case study.