Influence Control for Dynamic Reconfiguration of Data Flow Systems

Influence control is a very challenging issue in dynamic reconfiguration and still not well addressed in the literature. This paper argues that dynamic reconfiguration influences system execution in four ways: functional update, functional side-effect, logical influence on performance and physical influence on performance. Methods including version control, transaction tracing, switching reconfiguration plan, and reconfiguration scheduling have been proposed for controlling the influence. These methods are integrated into the Reconfigurable Data Flow (RDF) model, which is designed to support the dynamic reconfiguration of stateless data flow systems.