Management of Time Requirements in Component-Based Systems

In component-based systems, a number of existing software components are combined in order to achieve business goals. Some of such goals may include system-level (global) timing requirements (GTR). It is essential to refine GTR into a set of component-level (local) timing requirements (LTRs) so that if a set of candidate components collectively meets them, then the corresponding GTR is also satisfied. Existing techniques for computing LTRs produce monolithic representations, that have dependencies over multiple components. Such representations do not allow for effective component selection and repair. In this paper, we propose an approach for building under-approximated LTRs (

u

LTR) consisting of independent constraints over components. We then show how

u

LTR can be used to improve the design, monitoring and repair of component-based systems under time requirements. We also report on the implementation of this approach and its evaluation using real-world case studies in Web service composition. The results demonstrate its practical value and advantages over existing techniques.