Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference:	GR/R51872/01
Title:	Reflective Application Framework for Distributed Architectures
Principal Investigator:	Dearle, Professor A
Other Investigators:	Kirby, Dr G
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
Department:	Computer Science
Organisation:	University of St Andrews
Scheme:	Standard Research (Pre-FEC)
Starts:	01 October 2001	Ends:	31 October 2004	Value (£):	217,560
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:	Artificial Intelligence Networks & Distributed Systems
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:	Information Technologies
Related Grants:
Panel History:
Summary on Grant Application Form
Current approaches to creating distributed applications using middleware suffer from the following problems: 1. They force decisions to be made early in the design process over which classes may participate in inter-machine communication. 2. They are brittle with respect to changes in the ways in which the application is distributed. 3. It is difficult to understand and maintain the distributed application since particular parameter passing mechanisms may force an unnatural encoding of application level semantics. 4. It is difficult to observe the behaviour of a distributed application system since appropriate observation tools do not exist.In this project we propose to address these deficiencies by transforming applications (which may or may not be distributed) into isomorphic applications whose distribution architecture is flexible. We propose to create a meta-level architecture into which the transformed application may plug itself in order that the distributed behaviour of the transformed applicator may be observed. Observations may be used by system architects or by tools. Finally we propose to create tools that allow feedback from the observations into the system to permit the distribution aspects of the application to be changed. These changes will affect the non-functional aspects of the application such as resiliency, degree of replication, robustness, performance etc.
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Organisation Website:	http://www.st-and.ac.uk