Software architectures have recently emerged as a level of design concerned with specifying the overall structure of a system. Traditionally, software architectures only provide static descriptions of the participants and interaction structures in a system. Dynamic software architectures, however, can be reconfigured at runtime and therefore provide support for building dynamically adaptable applications. Software architectures can be specified using architectural reflection. In this paper we introduce an architecture meta-model that realises a dynamic software architecture. The architecture meta-model reifies the configuration graph of the architecture and is automatically generated from our component definitions and implementation language sourcecode.

There are known classes of software systems that can benefit from dynamic software evolution, including 24x7 systems that require on-line upgrades and adaptive systems that need to adapt to frequent changes in their execution environment . This paper investigates the use of dynamic software architectures and architectural reflection in building adaptive systems. We introduce the K-Component model and its architecture meta-model for building a dynamic software architecture. We address the issues of the integrity and safety of dynamic software evolution by modelling dynamic reconfiguration as graph transformations on a software architecture, and cleanly separate adaptation-specific code from functional code by encapsulating it in reflective programs called adaptation contracts. The paper also introduces the prototype implementation of our K-Component model.