A Unified Formal Model for Supporting Aspect-Oriented Dynamic Software Architecture

The management of software evolution as well as the maintenance of its complexity is of two most important problems to be solved by software engineering. Several solutions have been considered, one of them being the separation of concerns. These concepts have been extended along the life cycle of software development and thus, aspect oriented software development (AOSD) arose and shed new light on software evolution problems. In this paper we focus on the seamless integration of AOSD and software architecture to support dynamic software evolution in architecture level. Thus we propose an incremental aspect-oriented (AO) architecture modeling approach. In the approach we introduce a unified formal model, namely aspect weaving connector (AWC), to formalize the underlying mechanisms of aspect dynamic weaving in architecture level. Meanwhile, we introduce a simple and seamless extension of ACME ADL to support the modular representation of architectural aspects, components, AWC and their composition forms. For the unified connector model has been applied in our implemented framework for dynamic software architecture, a case study on adaptive JPS (Java pet store) is illustrated to show the advantages of this approach and the unified model.