Dynamic Reconfiguration of Software Architectures Through Aspects

Currently, most software systems have a dynamic nature and evolve at run-time. The dynamic reconfiguration of software architectures has to be supported in order to enable their architectural element instances and their links to be created and destroyed at run-time. Complex components also need reconfiguration capabilities to evolve their internal compositions. This paper introduces an approach to support the dynamic reconfiguration of software architectures taking advantage of aspect-oriented techniques. It enables complex components to autonomously reconfigure themselves: they are capable of both having knowledge of their current configuration and reconfiguring themselves at run-time. This approach has been developed for the PRISMA aspect-oriented architectural model. A new kind of aspect has been created in PRISMA in order to provide dynamic reconfiguration services to each complex component; it is called the Configuration Aspect .