Modeling QoS through architectural reflection

In the context of the MAIS 1 project, we designed a reflective architecture to be used for Multichannel Adaptive Information Systems. Architectural reflection is an emerging research topic that enables information systems to observe and control their own structure and behaviour. One of the main issues raised by architectural reflection is related to the understanding of the reflective knowledge and to its proper design, implementation, and usage. In our approach the reflective knowledge is quality of service (QoS) oriented in that it captures the QoS features exhibited by the system components. In this paper, we describe the different layers of our architecture focusing on how to model and to exploit QoS to achieve dynamic adaptability in a reflective architecture.