A distributed architecture meta-model for self-managed middleware

Openness and adaptation are the fundamental properties of reflective middleware platforms. Self-managed or autonomic systems require this behaviour, and therefore, reflective middleware platforms are ideally suited to the support of such systems. However, new classes of self-managed applications increasingly require support for co-coordinated, distributed reconfiguration, and there is limited provision for this in current reflective middleware approaches. In this paper, we document a general, flexible architecture meta-model for the safe and valid adaptation of components that make up the implementation of co-ordinating middleware nodes distributed across peer devices. We also investigate the flexibility of this approach in supporting different reconfiguration types in different environmental conditions