Research On The Attributes Of Adaptive Software Architecture

Software architecture, which is emerging as an important discipline for software engineering, is developing rapidly on both theory and practice. Software architecture is specified as components, connectors and their configuration. The formal specification of architecture is on the assumption of static system interaction and configuration. However, software system needs adaptation according with the variability of external environment during the system runtime on the requirement of user and the improvement of adaptable variability. The static formal specification on such systems falls to many drawbacks.In this paper, I firstly introduce the development of software architecture and the content of its early stages, briefly specify its purpose on software developing. Secondly, I configure the important role of software from viewpoint of the internal attributes for software developing. I analyze thirdly the requirements and the attributes of adaptive software systems and the importance of modeling on the architectural level. Lastly, I descript the attributes of the adaptive software architecture.Because many existing architectural description languages lack specification of dynamic interaction on architectural level, which makes modeling the adaptive software system insufficient, I use the Pi calculus to formalize the adaptive software architecture. Pi calculus can directly specify the dynamic change of the architectural topology during runtime, which is difficult to do so on CCS or CSP. That is one of main reason using it. The way to specify adaptive software architecture is that ports of component and roles ofconnector are formalized by process or agent, their interaction is formalized by composition and sum operator. Adaptive software system exists many dynamic behaviors of interaction, including the substitution of component, upgrading and the changes of topology. All of these operations can be naturally formalized using Pi calculus.