Exploiting reflection to design and manage services for an adaptive resource management system

Adaptivity' is one of the most challenging issues of today systems. The main goal of our adaptive resource management system is to identify and use the most appropriate resources, which are able to fulfill the current service request. Adaptivity is achieved by exploiting additional infonnation indicated by the users when making a service request and representing the qualities (i.e., availability, accessibility, location, execution qualities, etc.) that should characterize the supplied services. To achieve adaptivity at runtime, our approach exploits reflection at the architectural level through which we model explicitly the performance/non-functional aspects of the services provided by the underlying system's resources. Reflection introduces additional layers, which play an intermediary role between the representation of a system and applications, and enable resources to adapt to the applications' requests. In this paper, we focus on the representation of the services and their qualities at various architectural levels, and on the mechanisms we exploit to ensure adaptivity. © 2006 IEEE.