Applying OMG D&C specification and ECA rules for autonomous distributed component-based systems

Abstract

Manual administration of complex distributed applications is almost impossible to achieve. On the one side, work in autonomic computing focuses on systems that maintain themselves, driven by high-level policies. Such a self-administration relies on the concept of a control loop. The autonomic computing control loop involves an abstract representation of the system to analyze the situation and to adapt it properly. On the other side, models are currently used to ease design of complex distributed systems. Nevertheless, at runtime, models remain useless, because they are decoupled from the running system, which dynamically evolves. Our proposal, named DACAR, introduces models in the control loop. Using adequate models, it is possible to design and execute both the distributed systems and their autonomic policies. The metamodel suggested in this paper mixes both OMG Deployment and Configuration (OMG D&C) specification and the Event-Condition-Action (ECA) metamodels. This paper addresses the different concerns involved in the control loop and focuses on the metamodel concepts that are required to express entities of the control loop. This paper also gives an overview of our DACAR prototype and illustrates it on a ubiquitous application case study. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.