Middleware Reconfiguration Relying on Formal Methods

Adaptive middleware is a software for developing and executing distributed applications and can be reconfigured at runtime without its complete stop. The need of reconfiguration is usually triggered by changes in application´s requirements and environmental conditions, to fix bugs or to extend the middleware´s functionality. The development of an adaptive middleware still being a challenge due to the complexity of dealing with adaptation issues, such as how, when and where to reconfigure the middleware. Existing solutions to build adaptive middleware concentrate on the use of software mechanisms like aspect oriented programming and computational reflection to face the issues behind the reconfiguration. In this paper, we propose to reconfigure the middleware by moving adaptation decisions and actions from the middleware to an external and formally-based element. The whole adaptation process is performed based on the behavioural analysis of the middleware execution trace. In order to evaluate the proposed approach, we carried experimental experiments to check the effectiveness of the proposed adaptation mechanism and measure the overhead caused by the proposed adaptation mechanism.