Developers typically use software architecture models at design time to capture significant decisions about a software system's organization and to describe and establish a common understanding about the system's abstract properties. Architectural information isn't usually explicitly represented at runtime; developers transform and realize the architectural properties through runtime artifacts. Recently, the introduction of software platforms supporting component plug-in and dynamic binding has facilitated adaptation of software systems at runtime. Preserving the properties described by the architecture model during adaptation is an important task. We propose a self-adaptation approach that exploits architecture models to reason about and control adaptation at runtime. We can derive runtime models from design models facilitating the developers? task. We developed the approach in the context of mobile computing.

This article is part of a focus section on software architecture.