Dynamic adaptation of aspect-oriented components

Current works address self-adaptability of software architectures to build more autonomous and flexible systems. However, most of these works only perform adaptations at configuration-level: a component is adapted by being replaced with a new one. The state of the replaced component is lost and related components can undergo undesirable changes. This paper presents a generic solution to design components that are capable of supporting runtime adaptation, taking into account that component type changes must be propagated to its instances. The adaptation is performed in a decentralized and autonomous way, in order to cope with the increasing need for building heterogeneous and autonomous systems. As a result, each component type manages its instances and each instance applies autonomously the changes. Moreover, our proposal uses aspect-oriented components to benefit from their reuse and maintenance, and it is based on MOF and Reflection concepts to benefit from the high abstraction level they provide.