A Theory Agenda for Component-Based Design

Abstract

Abstract. The aim of the paper is to present a theory agenda for component-based design based on results that motivated the development of the BIP component framework, to identify open problems and discuss further research directions. The focus is on proposing a semantically sound theoretical and general framework for modelling componentbased systems and their properties both behavioural and architectural as well for achieving correctness by using scalable specific techniques.We discuss the problem of composing components by proposing the concept of glue as a set of stateless composition operators defined by a certain type of operational semantics rules. We provide an overview of results about glue expressiveness and minimality. We show how interactions and associated transfer of data can be described by using connectors and in particular, how dynamic connectors can be defined as an extension of static connectors. We present two approaches for achieving correctness for component-based systems. One is by compositional inference of global properties of a composite component from properties of its constituents and interaction constraints implied by composition operators. The other is by using and composing architectures that enforce specific coordination properties. Finally, we discuss recent results on architecture specification by studying two types of logics: 1) interaction logics for the specification of sets of allowed interactions; 2) configuration logics for the characterisation of architecture styles.

Formal Methods for Characterization and Analysis of Quality Specifications in Component-based Systems

“…The computer scientists and researchers have responded to the challenge of designing complex systems adopting various formal methods and compositional algebra based frameworks [34,35]. Typically, the component interactions and concurrency have been modeled formally using automated compositional reasoning and connector algebra [3,4,32].…”

Deadlock Avoidance Based on Graph Theory

“…Resource allocation graph and waiting graph are two mainly methods to describe deadlock [9]. Resource allocation graph is a variant of waiting diagram with two kinds of nodes: process node and resource node.…”

Formal Specification and Verification of Dynamic Parametrized Architectures

“…The approach closest to the one presented below is proposed in [31] as extension of the BIP (Behavior, Interaction, Priority) framework [6]. BIP has been extended for dynamic and parametrized connections in [7,23], and to allow spawning new components and interactions in [9].…”

“…BIP has been extended for dynamic and parametrized connections in [7,23], and to allow spawning new components and interactions in [9]. The work in [31] proposes a second-order logic to specify constraints on the evolution of the architecture including creation/removal of components. However, no model checking procedure is provided to verify such dynamic architectures.…”

“…While the literature about the formal specification of dynamic software architectures is abundant [5,[7][8][9][10]21,[24][25][26][31][32][33], very few works consider their formal verification and none of them provided a concrete evaluation showing the feasibility of the proposed analysis.…”