An Infrastructure for Generating Run-time Model Traces for Maintenance Tasks

Current research efforts are focused on taking advantage of the models at run-time for run-time decision making related to run-time system concerns associated with autonomic and adaptive systems. In addition, all systems need maintenance over time as new requirements emerge or when bug-fixing becomes necessary. Models at run-time can provide an execution trace of a high level of abstraction that is useful for maintenance tasks. In this paper, we propose a generic infrastructure, which is able to get the run-time model trace. Our infrastructure creates a descriptive model of the running code by means of Code-Model Connection Rules. These rules translate the behaviour of the running source code in model traces. We validate our infrastructure in a Smart Hotel. The results of our infrastructure show promising results towards the generation of model traces from source code at run-time. However, further work is required to a better specification of the rules, to solve some issues with the model dependencies and to allow the propagation of changes in the models to the source code.