Aiding the deployment and configuration of component middleware in distributed real-time and embedded systems

Abstract

Thesis under the supervision of Professor Douglas C. Schmidt:

Historically enterprise distributed, real-time and embedded (DRE) systems were developed atop of operating systems and protocols. These traditional methods were however replaced by stacks of middleware technologies in order to reuse existing architectural and design principles and avoid reinventing and reimplementing core distributed infrastructure capabilities and services. The most recent wave of middleware technologies offers higher-level abstractions, such as component models, web services, and model-driven middleware.

Although component middleware technologies successfully address many of the problems of previous generations of inflexible, monolithic, functionally-designed, and “stove-piped” enterprise DRE systems, they also introduce new challenges associated with the higher flexibility and configurability of the system, the manageability of the large number of deployment and configuration artifacts and ability of the system to evolve in response to improved understanding of the domain or feedback from end-to-end quality of service performance testing.

This thesis document first discusses how component repositories can be used to resolve many of the newly arisen deployment and configuration complexities in component-based middleware. Next it shows how Model-Driven Development (MDD) technologies can be applied to mitigate the complexities associated with configuring component middleware for quality of service.