Incremental Specification Validation and Runtime Adaptivity of Distributed Component Information systems

Despite all colossal efforts and investments by information systems (IS) practitioners and researchers, today's IS still remain far from timely exhibiting the required levels of adaptivity dictated by highly volatile, competitive and inter-organizational ('socio-techno-business') distributed environment. Difficulties in approaching dynamic adaptivity in IS remain essentially on how promoting manageability (e.g. simplicity/understandability/incrementality) without compromising correctness and distribution. Recapitulating from the wide acceptance and understandability of UML diagrammatical artifacts and the rigorous and distributed capabilities of component-based formalisms, we propose a stepwise approach for developing evolving distributed IS. Staring from UML-OCL descriptions, we smoothly shift them towards a tailored component Petri nets variant we called Co-NETS, where validation is geared by true-concurrent symbolic computations using rewriting logic. Applying ideas from recent AOP techniques, we then incrementally cope with behavioral dynamic changes by conceiving on top of each Co-NETS component and/or coordination a Petri net-based evolutionary aspect-layer and endow it with sound yet simple runtime weaving mechanisms