Automating the Building of Software Component Architectures

Abstract

Abstract. Assembling software components into an architecture is a difficult task because of its combinatorial complexity. There is thus a need for automating this building process, either to assist architects at design time or to manage the self-assembly of components at runtime. This paper proposes an automatic architecture building process that uses ports, and more precisely composite ports, to manage the connection of components. Our solution extends the Fractal component model. It has been implemented and experiments have been run to verify its good time performance, thanks to several optimization heuristics and strategies.

Search‐based many‐to‐one component substitution

“…The following sections introduce our contribution. First, we present how ports allow us to automatically build valid assemblies [6] and how the assembly building process can be seen as a search-based problem, more precisely as a Csp. We then show how our building algorithm can be used as part of a four step component substitution process, and discuss how the complexity of the algorithm can be tamed using various search strategies and heuristics.…”

“…In other words, the connections of an architecture must be sufficient to allow the execution of collaborations that reach (include) all its functional objectives. We call this completeness of the architecture [6]. Indeed, the use of a component functionality (modeled by the connection of an interface) can require the use of other functionalities which, in turn, entail new interface connections.…”

“…Our idea is to better consider a local property of components that, if true, guarantees that the component is adequately connected to its immediate neighbors, and then to aggregate these local values into a global completeness property. We call this local property coherence and have shown [6] that it is a necessary condition for validity. Intuitively, we will see that when all components of an assembly are coherent, the assembly is complete.…”

“…In this case, the composite port can still be coherent if it shares the connected primitive ports with another unrelated composite port (of the same component) which is itself entirely connected. Indeed, sharing of primitive ports represents alternative connection possibilities [6]. A partially connected composite port can represent a role which is useless for the assembly as long as its shared primitive ports are connected in the context of another (significant) composite port.…”

“…In other words, the connections of an architecture must be sufficient to allow the execution of collaborations that reach (include) all its functional objectives. We call this completeness of the architecture [6]. Indeed, the use of a component functionality (modeled by the connection † We assume that the selected components need no adaptation (or have already been adapted) as it is the only situation in which the components' external definitions are sufficient to match (whatever the definition of matching is) with other components' needs.…”