Title :
Building reconfiguration primitives into the law of a system
Author :
Minsky, Naftaly H. ; Ungureanu, Victoria ; Zhang, Junbiao ; Wang, Wenhui
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Comput. Sci., Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, NJ, USA
Abstract :
Given a certain class C of reconfigurations, deemed to be potentially important for a given system, we define a reconfiguration suite Sc to be a set of primitive operations that satisfy the following conditions: any reconfiguration in C can be carried out by a sequence of primitives from Sc. The correctness of Sc should be independent of the functionality of the system, and invariant of its reconfigurations (for a given set of possible configurations of the system at hand). We describe a mechanism for implementing such reconfiguration suites, for a system that operates under law-governed interaction (LGI), currently supported by an experimental toolkit called Moses. LGI is a mode of interaction between the members of a given group (or system) of agents, which is governed by an explicit and strictly enforced set of rules, called the law of this group. The existence of such a law under LGI provides us with an architectural model of the system, which can be made to include the definition of reconfiguration suites.
Keywords :
configuration management; distributed processing; software development management; software reusability; LGI; Moses; agents; architectural model; correctness; distributed systems; law; law-governed interaction; primitive operations; reconfiguration suite; reconfiguration suites; rules; softwar reconfiguration primitives; system functionality; toolkit; Computer science; Protocols; Token networks;
Conference_Titel :
Configurable Distributed Systems, 1996. Proceedings., Third International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Annapolis, MD, USA
Print_ISBN :
0-8186-7395-8
DOI :
10.1109/CDS.1996.509350