Using architecture models for runtime adaptability

Every software system has architecture. The architecture strongly influences the software system´s properties, including maintainability and runtime properties such as performance and reliability. By describing the architecture in models, we can make the architecture explicit. Developers typically use software architecture models at design time to capture the significant decisions about a software system´s organization and to describe and establish a common understanding about the system´s abstract properties. In the MADAM (mobility- and adaptation-enabling middleware) project, we aim to facilitate adaptive application development for mobile computing. We follow an architecture-centric approach where we represent architecture models at runtime to allow generic middleware components to reason about and control adaptation.