On Adding Some Mobility Primitives to an Architecture Description Language

In mobile software systems specification, we focus on the movement of software elements across a network of locations and on how their execution environment may change without altering or changing their internal structure or behavior. It seems evident that we are more interested on the topology of the system and its possible evolutions; by means of components movement; rather than the detailed code of each component. Consequentely, it is necessary that the global structure, of the system under specification, emerges at an early stage. Architecture Description Languages (ADLs for short) seem to be the adequate framework. However, most of the existing ADLs define system structure statiquely, i.e. these ADLs do not support mobility of components, and/or their semantics is not well defined. In this work, we attempt to extend an ADL, the CBabel language, by defining a new notion of components location-mobility space of components- and a set of primitives governing components mobility. CBabel language is chosen for its simple syntax and rigorous semantics, based on rewriting logic, allowing formal verification of system properties