Modeling and analyzing architectural change with alloy

Although adaptivity based on reconfiguration has the potential to improve dependability of systems, the cost of a failed attempt at reconfiguration is prohibitive in precisely the applications where high dependability is required. Existing work on formal modeling and verification of architectural reconfigurations partly achieve the goal of ensuring correctness, however the formalisms used often lack tool support and the ensuing models have uncertain relation to a concrete implementation. Thus a practical way to ensure with formal certainty that specific architectural changes are correct remains a barrier to the uptake of reconfiguration techniques in industry. Using the Alloy language and associated tool, we propose a practical way to formally model and analyze runtime architectural change expressed as architectural scripts. Our evaluation shows the performance to be acceptable; our experience that the modelling language is convenient and expressive, and that our model accurately repesents the implementation it is used to reason about.