Automata for Context-Dependent Connectors

Abstract. Recent approaches to component-based software engineering employ coordinating connectors to compose components into software systems. For maximum flexibility and reuse, such connectors can themselves be composed, resulting in an expressive calculus of connectors whose semantics encompasses complex combinations of synchronisation, mutual exclusion, non-deterministic choice and state-dependent behaviour. A more expressive notion of connector includes also contextdependent behaviour, namely, whenever the choices the connector can take change non-monotonically as the context, given by the pending activity on its ports, changes. Context dependency can express notions of priority and inhibition. Capturing context-dependent behaviour in formal models is non-trivial, as it is unclear how to propagate context information through composition. In this paper we present an intuitive automata-based formal model of context-dependent connectors, and argue that it is superior to previous atte...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2009
• Where: COORDINATION
• Authors: Marcello M. Bonsangue, Dave Clarke, Alexandra Silva
• Keywords: Automata-based Formal Model, COORDINATION 2009, Coordination Language Reo, Distributed And Parallel Computing, Formal Model