Beschreibung:
Our interest in the field of software architecture is focused on the application in technical systems, such as control systems. Our current research in this field is centered around a real-life case study, a control system for unmanned vehicles transporting containers on the "Maasvlakte" , an area in the ports of Rotterdam.Important issues in this control system are scalability, evolvability, and on-line change capacities.In this paper, we discuss two mechanisms for on-line change in the distributed control system for the Maasvlakte system, which we have implemented in Java. The software architecture we use is a configuration of distributed processes, communicating according to the subscription model. We will focus on the software architectural aspects of the mechanisms for on-line change. One of these mechanisms is associated with the decoupling of processes as a result of the subscription-based communication model. The other mechanism is based on the late-binding properties of Java.