A Model-Based Approach for User Requirements Decomposition and Component Selection

To meet user requirements, Commercial-off-the-Shelf (COTS) component based systems are built by integrating different components potentially provided by different vendors. The gap between the user requirements, related to the overall system, and the available components can be large. Thus the selection of appropriate components for building the system becomes a difficult task, especially when non-functional requirements are taken into account. In this paper, we propose an approach to close this gap in the context of highly available systems to be deployed on a Service Availability Forum (SA Forum) compliant middleware. Our approach decomposes the user requirements into lower level requirements, referred to as configuration requirements with the help of an ontology. Sets of components satisfying the functional requirements are checked for compliance with non-functional requirements and chosen accordingly. It is a model based approach, which consists of six metamodels and the necessary transformations including traceability links between user requirements and a solution to facilitate system evolution and maintainability.