Software Engineering and Fault Tolerance Research Group

Software Component Adaptation for the Development of Dependable Systems

A system's requirements can be grouped in two categories, namely functional requirements which are concerned with the purpose of a system (i.e. what it does) and non-functional requirements which are more concerned with its fitness for purpose (i.e. how well it does it). A dependable system is one that can be justifiably relied upon to provide its services. The dependability include concerns related with non-functional requirements such as fault-tolerance and security. Non-functional requirements can be considered of specific domains composed by well-defined techniques used to guarantee the dependability of software systems. These techniques should be reusable across a wide range of problems domains.

Component-based software engineering (CBSE) focuses on building large software systems by integrating previously existing software components. However, experience in CBSE has show that the idea of simply selecting a set of components and integrating them with no adaptation to components almost never occurs in practice. Hence, the CBSE will only become widespread when third-party application builders can be able to adapt components as needed by their system's requirements.

One of the challenges in applying the CBSE paradigm to critical software systems is guaranteeing dependability. The construction of dependable systems is not a simple task. It requires the use of appropriate techniques during the whole process of development of a system. The use of software components require component adaptation techniques to be applied in order to satisfy the system's requirements.

The thesis aims to produce an adaptation technique that motivate the adaptation of third-party software components after they have been designed, implemented, and made available for purchase.
The technique will produce a new component called adapted component.
The technique should have the following premises:

the component adaptation should be transparent to the component's client;

the component's source code can not be modified, it should be able to adapt black-box components;

the structure implementing the required behaviour should be reusable with various components;

the adaptation should requires no changes in the application using the adapted component.

Project Members

Gerson Mizuta Weiss

Up to Ongoing Projects List

Last updated July, 20 2000