Model-driven Update: An Approach to Runtime Evolution of Context-aware Software Systems

It is well known that a software system needs to evolve during its life time to cope with changes in its environments and/or requirements that were not anticipated during its development time. Developing a software system that evolves at runtime is still a difficult task. Issues like (a) lack of an approach to develop a system that has the ability to be changed at runtime and (b) lack of a mechanism to enable runtime evolution of a system in response to unanticipated changes need to be solved for easy and effective development and evolution of a software system. In this report, we introduce a novel approach to ease the task of developing and evolving context-aware systems. Our approach supports system’s modelling and its implementations generation from their models. These generated implementations have the ability to be evolved, where each generated system element is engineered with the ability to be added, removed, or modified at runtime. To enable system’s runtime evolution, we have developed a tool that enables the software engineer to load a running system model, change this model to take into account the unanticipated changes, and then reflect the required changes to the running system automatically. To demonstrate the viability of our approach, we used it to develop and evolve a context-aware route planner. We also assessed the performance of our approach through measuring the overhead caused by performing the system evolution at runtime. The results demonstrate that our approach is capable of performing runtime evolution in a short time.

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