An MDA Approach for Adaptable Components

Components should provide maximum flexibility to increase their reusability in different applications and to work under changing environment conditions as part of a single application. Thus, adaptation and reconfiguration mechanisms of single components and component assemblies play a crucial role in achieving this goal. In this paper we present a model of Adaptable Components that allows modelling of adaptation and reconfiguration operations taking place at development, deployment or runtime. The concept of composite components is utilized to encapsulate adaptation operators and to map component parameters to different predefined internal configurations of subcomponents. The component model is not tied to a particular component platform. Instead, it can be mapped to existing component platforms like EJB using an MDA approach. Different Platform-Specific Models for the same target component platform enable tailored flexibility for particular component deployments. For example, a model can support or not support runtime reconfiguration. Extensions to UML diagrams are introduced to graphically model reconfiguration operations.