Inheritance in Architecture Description Languages

This paper explores ways by which inheritance can be defined for and used in specification languages, especially ADLs and CDLs that are now widely used in software engineering for specifying software architectures and components. The fact that most specification languages share many properties with object oriented languages – which use inheritance for variety of purposes – is the main motivation for this research. We will analyze the roles of the inheritance concept in specification languages and try to find criteria for evaluating it. The main focus, however, will be on proposing inheritance for the main abstractions of SOFA CDL – a practically used component definition language. An introduction of inheritance mechanisms for the SOFA CDL interfaces, frames and architectures is also the main results presented in this paper.

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