An MDE Approach for Runtime Monitoring and Adapting Component-Based Systems: Application to WIMP User Interface Architectures

In certain systems, software must be adapted at runtime to the requirements and changes occurring in the context. A strategy to achieve this goal is to model such systems as software architectures making use of the Component-based Software Engineering (CBSE). Thus, the system can be adapted through the reconfiguration of the software architectures. In this paper we present a schema for the adaptation of software architectures at runtime based on the system context observation. The software system is defined by means of architectural models at two levels: abstract and concrete. We use a trading process to regenerate concrete architectural models from their abstract definitions and a component repository. We also use Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) techniques to transform at runtime such models in order to achieve the system adaptation to the monitored context by using observers. This article describes a case study of component-based user interfaces to illustrate our approach.