6 . Validation
In order to assess the effective viability of the proposed approach, we have implemented METIS. This is a proof of
concept implementation developed as open source project at http://www.aeolus-project.org/software/. The implementation
is about 3.5K lines of code written in OCaml and it is distributed under GPL license.
METIS takes as input an encoding of the universe in the JSON format following the Aeolus Universe JSON Schema.6 For
example, Listing 2 shows the specification of the Application component type depicted in Fig. 2. Each component type is
specified by means of a name (field name) and by the automaton describing its behavior. Each state is defined by a name,
a list of successors, and a list of the provided and required ports.7 METIS outputs the sequence of actions needed to
deploy the target in textual format and the abstract plan as a directed graph in dot format [33,34].