Repository and meta-data design for efficient component consistency verification

Composing a complete component-based application as well as updating a subset of its components may involve complex issues of maintaining application consistency. Its verification is a computationally-intensive problem, especially for behavioural compatibility or extra-functional property assessment. This poses serious challenge on resource-constrained devices which represent an important future computing platform. This work describes an approach that addresses this challenge by separating the tasks of obtaining the results of component consistency evaluation and using them in deployment and update processes. The first task in our approach is performed by a repository with sufficient computational resources. The results are transformed into rich, remotely accessible meta-data which are easily checked by the component frameworks and application management agents on the devices. Experiences with a prototype implementation called CRCE as well as validation measurements suggest that the approach can make application consistency evaluation feasible in resource-constrained scenarios. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.