On-line change mechanisms

Abstract

Our interest in the field of software architecture is focused on the application in technical systems, such as control systems. Our current research in this field is centered around a real-life case study, a control system for unmanned vehicles transporting containers on the "Maasvlakte" , an area in the ports of Rotterdam.Important issues in this control system are scalability, evolvability, and on-line change capacities.In this paper, we discuss two mechanisms for on-line change in the distributed control system for the Maasvlakte system, which we have implemented in Java. The software architecture we use is a configuration of distributed processes, communicating according to the subscription model. We will focus on the software architectural aspects of the mechanisms for on-line change. One of these mechanisms is associated with the decoupling of processes as a result of the subscription-based communication model. The other mechanism is based on the late-binding properties of Java.