Domain-Driven Reconfiguration in Collaborative Virtual Environments

When virtual environments (VE) collaborate to create a shared virtual world, events occur that can have catastrophic effects on that virtual world. These events can be system events, such as the loss of a host or a network link to that host. They can also be events that happen only in the virtual world, for example, a virtual activity that migrates, bringing increased activity to a different VE. To maintain acceptable or realistic behavior can require the restructuring of the collaborative virtual environment (CVE) during execution. The restructuring must take place in accordance with a set of rules mandated by the domain and specific application. The reconfiguration must occur quickly, to maintain realism for the users. Automatic restructuring brings the added benefit of fewer support staff. We call the automatic restructuring of a distributed application with respect to these rules Domain-Driven Reconfiguration and we have developed a software engineering environment to support its inclusion in CVEs. (Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-97-32