Supporting Integration of COTS Components from a Perspective of Self-Adaptive Software Architecture

Component-Based Software Development (CBSD) provides a high efficient and low cost way to construct software systems by integrating reusable software components. Although CBSD has already become a widely accepted paradigm, it is still beyond possibility to assemble components easily from commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components into one application system. A variety of mismatches between components often impede the integration of COTS components, and component adaptation is becoming a key problem in Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE). Aiming at this requirement, this paper presents a self-adaptive software architecture (model-based) approach for supporting seamless integration of COTS components. Specifically, we first propose a self-adaptive software architecture model, and then we discuss and exemplify how to eliminate the mismatches between heterogeneous COTS components based on this model. A simplified on-line shopping system is referred throughout the paper to illustrate our approach.