Towards a Programming Model and Middleware Architecture for Self-configuring systems

Today´s distributed computing solutions are mostly static in nature and variations in system behavior have to be compiled into the system in advance, because today´s technology does not permit self-configuring through dynamic rebinding of components. Self-configuring systems need a design approach based on behavioral specification as well as a middleware layer that can use these specifications to dynamically bind system components at run-time. In this paper, we present a service-oriented programming model and middleware for self-configuring systems. Our approach is based on semantic descriptions of components augmented with contextually dependent non-functional requirements for accomplishing the dynamic binding. For this purpose, we model service inter-dependencies as variability points. The middleware dynamically re-configures system behavior by mapping the variability points to components providing the needed functionality. Along with the middleware design needed for such an approach, we also present our programming model-called reconfigurable programming-and show how it can be used to put together self-configuring systems