Safety Implementation of Adaptive Embedded Control Components

The paper deals with dynamic reconfigurations of component-based adaptive embedded control systems to be automatically handled at run-time by intelligent agents. We define a Control Component as a software unit supporting control tasks of the system which is assumed to be a network of components with precedence constraints. We assume a reconfiguration scenario as any run-time operation allowing the addition, removal or update of software components to adapt the system to its environment. Several complex networks can implement the system such that each one is executed at a given time when a corresponding reconfiguration scenario is automatically applied by the agent. The latter is specified in our research by nested state machines to cover all reconfiguration forms of the software architecture, structure or data of the system. We propose technical solutions to implement the whole agent-based architecture, by defining UML meta-models for both Control Components and also agents. To guarantee safety dynamic reconfigurations at run-time, we define service and reconfiguration processes for components and use the semaphore concept to ensure safety mutual exclusions.