An Approach based on Bigraphical Reactive Systems to Check Architectural Instance Conforming to its Style

With the spread of the Internet and software evolution in complex intensive systems, software architecture often need be reconfigured during run time in dynamic, heterogeneous environments in order to satisfy design objectives, which poses new problems such as, does the architecture of a system conform to the given architectural style? Existing formal methods for the conformance check are either obscure to be understood, or inadequate to express parameters, global conditions, and so on. In this paper, we present an approach to check architectural instance conforming to its style based on bigraphical reactive systems (BRSs). We extend bigraph and Sigma-sorted BRS to describe architectural instance and architectural style respectively, and provide an approach to support the conformance check. The approach not only provides a visual and formal mechanism to specify architectural instances and styles, but also enriches the capability to model evolving systems and deal with parametric reaction rules, which are excellent over other existing formal methods naturally. An important theorem the changing bigraphs always preserve the constraints defined by Sigma-sorted BRS if the initial bigraph and reaction rules do is proved and a conformance algorithm is presented. Two cases are studied in order to illustrate the effectiveness of our approach.