Affiliations: Department of Computer and Information Sciences, The
University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL, U.S.A. | Department of Computer and Information Science,
Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis, Indianapolis, IN,
USA | Department of Computer Science, Naval Postgraduate
School, Monterey, CA, USA
Abstract: Component-Based Software Architecture is a promising solution for
realizing distributed computing systems. To develop high quality software for
such systems, an analysis of non-functional aspects of the software properties
(also called Quality of Service or QoS) is very important. The UniFrame
research project defines a Unified Meta-Component Model Framework (UniFrame)
that includes a notion of QoS contracts. A classification of Quality of Service
parameters, both static and dynamic, relevant to component-based distributed
computing is developed and represented formally using Two-Level Grammar (TLG),
an object-oriented formal specification language. TLG may be transformed into
both a UML model, augmented with OCL constraints, and executable code in the
Java programming language. This may be regarded as standardized code for
implementation of the distributed application with dynamic measurement of the
Quality of Service aspects incorporated. The approach is consistent with OMG's
Model Driven Architecture (MDA) in that QoS properties may be specified at the
Platform Independent Model (PIM) level and then carried down to the Platform
Specific Model (PSM) level in implementation.
Keywords: formal specification, quality of service (QoS) component-based software
architecture, uniframe, two-level grammar (TLG), object constraint language (OCL), model driven architecture (MDA)
