Event Actors Based Approach for Supporting Analysis and Verification of Event-Driven Architectures

Event Actors Based Approach for Supporting Analysis and Verification of Event-Driven Architectures

Abstract

Event-based communication styles are potential solutions for facilitating high flexibility, scalability, and concurrency of distributed systems due to the intrinsic loose coupling of the participants. However, software developers often find the event-driven communication style unintuitive, especially for large and complex systems with numerous constituting elements, because of its non-deterministic characteristics. In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on DERA---an event actor-based framework---which can be used to describe distributed event-based systems with reduced nondeterminism. DERA's graphical notations support representing a current snapshot of an event-based system closely to the intuitive perception of the developers. We propose a formal specification of the event actors-based constructs and the graphical notations based on Petri nets in order to enable formal analysis of such snapshots. Based on this, an automated translation from event actors-based constructs to Petri nets using template-based model transformation techniques is also developed. The applicability of our approach is shown through an industrial case study in the field of service platform integration.

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Authors
  • Tran, Huy
  • Zdun, Uwe
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Shortfacts
Category
Paper in Conference Proceedings or in Workshop Proceedings
Event Title
17th IEEE International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference (EDOC)
Divisions
Software Architecture
Subjects
Software Engineering
Event Location
Vancouver, BC, Canada
Event Type
Conference
Event Dates
September 9-13, 2013
Publisher
IEEE Computer Society Press
Page Range
pp. 217-226
Date
September 2013
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