Using coordinated actors to model families of distributed systems

Abstract

Software product line engineering enables strategic reuse in development of families of related products. In a component-based approach to product line development, components capture functionalities appearing in one or more products in the family and different assemblies of components yield to various products or configurations. In this approach, an interaction model which effectively factors out the logic handling variability from the functionality of the system greatly enhances the reusability of components. We study the problem of variability modeling for a family of distributed systems expressed in actor model. We define a special type of actors called coordinators whose behavior is described as Reo circuits with the aim of encapsulating the variability logic. We have the benefits of Reo language for expressing coordination logic, while modeling the entire system as an actor-based distributed model. We have applied this model to a case study extracted from an industrial software family in the domain of interactive TV. © 2012 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.