Towards a Rewriting Semantics for a Software Architecture Description Language

Abstract Software architecture description languages (ADL) allow a software designer to focus on high- level aspects of an application by abstracting from the details of the components that compose an architecture. It is precisely this abstraction that makes ADLs suitable for verification using model checking techniques. ADLs are, in a way, domain-specific languages for aspects such as coordination, distribution and quality-of-service. The CBabel ADL defines the concept of contracts that precisely captures these architecture-level aspects. In this paper we propose a rewriting semantics for CBabel, that is, a formal semantics for CBabel specified in rewriting logic, a unifying formalism for concurrency models that has interesting properties as a logic and semantic framework due to its unified view of computation and proof. Using the Maude system, a high-performance implementation of rewriting logic, we formally verify the producer-consumer-buffer problem using model checking and state search.