Agent paradigm for adaptable architecture

Abstract

Dynamic changes to an architecture is an active area of research within the software architecture community. Architectures must have the ability to react to events and perform architectural changes autonomously. In this paper, we focus on dynamic architectures reconfiguration. Our principle is to use the agent architectural concept to achieve this functionality with respect to some quality attributes. Hence the questions that we are currently facing: what are the architectural principles involved in building adaptable architecture? How should these architectures be evaluated? In addition, we adopt the B formal method to support design specifications for agent software architecture. Formal modeling of a specification of our agent software architecture enables us to analyze and reason about it with mathematical precision and allows obtaining the abstract specification of the initial architecture formally. Besides, the design decisions are stored with the goal of making the reconfiguration tasks easier by the agent. This paper describes work in progress and presents some interesting ideas connected to architectural agents.