A Feature-Oriented Adaptive Component Model for Dynamic Evolution

Dynamic adaptation has been an essential requirement for more and more business systems. Some research works have focused on the structural or behavioral changes of adaptive programs. There are also some works on adaptive components, with the emphasis on separation between control flow and basic functions of components. In these works, a business model for the domain is always missing, so a comprehensible business view of adaptations is unavailable for the user. In this paper, we propose a feature-oriented adaptive component model, which introduces the ontology-based feature model proposed in our previous work on feature-based domain modeling to provide both the business view for the user and adaptation basis for the system. Furthermore, the ontology-based model provides unambiguous terminology for both the business view and the component specification, which ensures the consistency between them. This feature-oriented adaptive component model has another characteristic of the micro control flow within the component, which enables the adaptation of the component behavior, including interaction sequence and style. The adaptive component model has been applied in our intelligent connector based framework for dynamic architecture, so a case study on the adaptive version of JPS (Java Pet Store) is illustrated to show the advantages of the component model