% $Id: abstract.tex 16887 2009-02-21 02:40:43Z gokhale $
\begin{abstract}

The quality of a software architecture for component-based distributed
systems is defined not just by its source code but also by other
systemic artifacts, such as the assembly, deployment, and configuration
of the application components and their component middleware.  In the
context of distributed, real-time, and embedded (DRE) component-based
systems, bin packing algorithms and schedulability analysis have been
used to make deployment and configuration decisions.  However, these
algorithms make only coarse-grained node and priority assignments but do
not indicate how components are allocated to different middleware
containers on the node, which are known to impact runtime system
performance and resource consumption.  This paper presents a model
transformation-based algorithm that combines user-specified quality of
service (QoS) requirements with the node assignments to provide a finer
level of granularity and precision in the deployment and configuration
decisions.  A beneficial side effect of our work lies in how these
decisions can be leveraged by additional backend performance
optimization techniques.  We evaluate our approach and compare it
against the existing state-of-the-art in the context of a representative
DRE system.

\textbf{Keywords:} Model-driven engineering, Graph/model
transformations, component-based systems, deployment.

\end{abstract}
