Welcome to my PhD Thesis Page !!!

Automatic Configuration of
Component-Based Distributed Systems

Fabio Kon

Department of Computer Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, May, 2000

Abstract

Recent developments in component technology enable the construction of complex software systems by assembling off-the-shelf components. However, it is still difficult to develop efficient, reliable, and dynamically configurable component-based systems. Components are often developed by different groups with different methodologies. Unspecified dependencies and behavior lead to unexpected failures.

This thesis demonstrates that the explicit representation of inter-component dependence is fundamental for the development of efficient, configurable, and reliable component-based systems.  This provides a common ground for supporting fault-tolerance and automating dynamic configuration to facilitate system management and maintenance.

In this thesis, we present a generic architecture for managing dependencies in distributed component systems, describe a concrete implementation of this architecture, and discuss how it can be used to support automatic configuration. The architecture is divided in three parts: the Automatic Configuration Service, the component configurator framework, and the reconfiguration agents framework.

We describe the deployment of the architecture in centralized and distributed systems and present detailed experimental results.

BibTeX entry:

@PhdThesis{konPhD,
  author =       {Fabio Kon},
  title =        "{Automatic Configuration of Component-Based Distributed Systems}",
  school =       {Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at
                  Urbana-Champaign},
  year =         2000,
  month =        {May}
}
For your convenience, the thesis is available in the following three formats.
  1. HTML Web Page

  2. Compressed Postscript (0.5 MB)

  3. PDF (1.3MB)

The slides used in the defense are available in

  1. PowerPoint Format (0.3MB)

  2. Compressed Postscript (1MB)

  3. PDF (3MB)

A single page with the thesis abstract is available in

  1. Compressed Postscript

  2. PDF

Disclaimer: I actually didn't want to have so many files but since I had to create them, I thought I'd make them available :-)

And, finally, some pictures that Paula took some minutes before the defense.

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