| Summary: | Distributed Event-Based Systems (DEBSs) are middleware supporting the
interaction of publisher and subscriber components via events. In
DEBSs, the subscribers to be notified when an event is announced are
decided at run-time without requiring publisher components to know the
name or locations of the subscribers, nor the subscribers to know the
name or locations of the publishers. This low coupling between
components makes DEBSs suitable for applications with a large or
unpredictable number of autonomous components.
The development of applications in DEBSs is an ad hoc process poorly
supported by current software engineering methodologies. Moreover, the
behaviours exhibited by these systems and their applications are not
well understood, and no suitable models exist where these behaviours
can be described and analyzed. The main concern of this thesis is the
development of such models. Specifically, we develop formalisms and
models supporting the specification, prediction, and validation of the
behaviour exhibited by the middleware and the applications executing
on it.
Our main contributions to the area are: new formalisms for the
representation of DEBSs and their applications, and for the
specification of both, system and application properties; a
categorization of the features related to the definition,
announcement, and notification of events in DEBSs and, in general,
event-based systems; models representing the categorized DEBS
features; case studies detailing models and properties for specific
systems; a prototype tool for the verification of DEBSs and
applications. The formalisms developed expose the location of the
actions in the modelled systems and support the specification of
several forms of location-awareness and adaptive behaviour.
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