Database-centric architecture

About: Database-centric architecture is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1799 publications have been published within this topic receiving 48836 citations.

A self-organizing architecture for pervasive ecosystems

Abstract: It is getting increasingly recognized that the models and tools of standard service-oriented architectures are not adequate to tackle the decentralized, pervasive, and very dynamic scenarios of modern ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) systems, and that innovative and flexible software architectures have to be identified. This paper discusses how these architectures could get inspiration from natural systems, so as to enforce those features of self-adaptability and evolvability that are inherent in natural systems. In particular, we propose to get inspiration from ecological systems to model and deploy services as autonomous individuals, spatially-situated in an ecosystem of other services, data sources and pervasive devices. Services will be able to self-organize their interaction patterns according to a sort of "food web" and in respect of a limited set of interaction laws. Accordingly, the paper introduces a general reference architecture to frame the key concepts of our ecological approach, details its characteristics, and also with the help of a case study, discusses its implementation and presents simulation results to show the effectiveness of the approach.

Run-Time Monitoring and Real-Time Visualization of Software Architectures

Abstract: Software architecture stands at the backbone of any software system. An up-to-date description of the architecture greatly contributes to its understanding, evaluation and evolution. Despite its importance, the architecture is typically described only in the preliminary development phases and later becomes subject of continuous degradation. Therefore, methods and corresponding tool support for reconstructing the current views of a system's architecture have been developed and proposed. Current state of the art addresses the reconstruction of static and dynamic views separately. The reconstruction is typically conducted post-mortem using heavy weight infrastructures. We have conceptually defined and built a light-weight run-time monitoring infrastructure that produces meaningful real-time visualizations of object-level interactions. We consider that the possibility to observe the behavior of a system in real-time positively impacts the documentation of the software architecture, its understandability, communication and trace ability to usage scenarios. We have evaluated the monitoring infrastructure on a software project in different development stages. The evaluation has shown very promising results.

A Relational Architecture Description Language for Software Families

Abstract: Software Product-Line Engineering has emerged in recent years, as an important strategy for maximising reuse within the context of a family of related products. In current approaches to software product-lines, there is general agreement that the definition of a reference-architecture for the product-line is an important step in the software engineering process. In this paper we introduce ADLARS, a new form of architecture Description language that places emphasis on the capture of architectural relationships. ADLARS is designed for use within a product-line engineering process. The language supports both the definition of architectural structure, and of important architectural relationships. In particular it supports capture of the relationships between product features, component and task architectures, interfaces and parameter requirements.

A formal description language for multi-agent architectures

Abstract: Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) constitute a highly promising software architectural approach for modern application domains such as peer-to-peer and ubiquitous computing, information retrieval, semantic web services or e-business. Unfortunately, despite considerable work in software architecture during the last decade, few research efforts have aimed at truly defining languages for designing such architectures. This paper identifies the foundations for an architectural description language (ADL) to specify multi-agent system architectures. We propose a set of system design concepts based on the BDI (belief-desire-intention) agent model and existing classical ADLs. We conceptualize it with the Z specification language to capture a "core" model of structural and behavioural elements fundamental to an architecture description for BDI-MAS. We partially apply it on a data integration system example to illustrate our proposal.