Designing and exploiting the location concept in a reflective architecture

Reflective architectures aim at enabling information systems to adapt themselves dynamically and automatically in the attempt to accomplish the anytime, anywhere, anyone paradigm. The difficulties raised by using reflection at the architectural level are mostly related to the knowledge it should capture and of its proper design and implementation. Within this paper, attention is concentrated on Location and how it can be represented and exploited in various types of systems using architectural reflection to achieve adaptivity. We present three main types of systems: (1) wide area systems for which Location is expressed in geographical coordinates; (2) local area systems (e.g., complex of buildings) for which Location is not only horizontal, but also vertical, and (3) local area systems for which Location is completely known at configuration time. To calculate the distance between two Locations, the first case uses road maps, while the last two consider maps of buildings.