Component reconfiguration in the presence of conflicts

Components are traditionally modeled as black-boxes equipped with interfaces that indicate provided/required ports and, often, also conflicts with other components that cannot coexist with them. In modern tools for automatic system management, components become grey-boxes that show relevant internal states and the possible actions that can be acted on the components to change such state during the deployment and reconfiguration phases. However, state-of-the-art tools in this field do not support a systematic management of conflicts. In this paper we investigate the impact of conflicts by precisely characterizing the increment of complexity on the reconfiguration problem.