Behavior Composition in Component Systems

Abstract

In order to formally verify a component application, it is suitable to structure the formal specification of its behavior according to the application architecture. Such an approach eases the maintenance of the specification and allows utilizing efficient verification algorithms that are based on decomposition of the application into several communicating parts. How those parts cooperate is formally described via an operation that is called behavior composition. In this thesis we claim that in current software component systems behavior composition has typically two drawbacks: (1) it lacks support for composition error detection and (2) it does not address the problem of unbounded parallelism specification. While detection of composition errors allows checking design inconsistencies at a design time, unbounded parallelism specification is necessary for precise formal description of reentrant components that are used in practice very often. Therefore we introduce two new concepts - the consent operator and the behavior templates - in order to address both the issues (1) and (2). Our solutions are demonstrated on the SOFA component model [35], behavior protocols [32] are used as a behavior specification language.