Modelling dynamic software architectures using typed graph grammars

Several recent research efforts have focused on the dynamic aspects of software architectures providing suitable models and techniques for handling the run-time modification of the structure of a system. A large number of heterogeneous proposals for addressing dynamic architectures at many different levels of abstraction have been provided, such as programmable, ad-hoc, self-healing and self-repairing among others. It is then important to have a clear picture of the relations among these proposals by formulating them into a uniform framework and contrasting the different verification aspects that can be reasonably addressed by each proposal. Our work is a contribution in this line. In particular, we map several notions of dynamicity into the same formal framework in order to distill the similarities and differences among them. As a result we explain different styles of architectural dynamisms in term of graph grammars and get some better insights on the kinds of formal properties that can be naturally associated to such different specification styles. We take a simple automotive scenario as a running example to illustrate main ideas.