Modeling Software Components Using Behavior Protocols

This thesis proposes a novel approach for a description of a software component’s behavior. The behavior is specified by using behavior protocols –a notation similar to regular expressions, which is easy to read and comprehend. Based on an abstract model of communication between software components, the thesis introduces a notion of component behavior and defines a compliance relation of a component behavior and a protocol-based component specification. The concept of the behavior resp. protocol compliance can be used for reasoning about the specification refining correctness that can be verified at design time and adherence of a component’s implementation to its specification to be checked at run time. Further, the behavior compliance forms the basis for a definition of the a component dynamic update correctness. As a proof of the concept, the behavior protocols are used in the SOFA architecture description language at multiple levels of component abstraction. The application of the abstract communication model to SOFA allows to define a relationship among component descriptions at different abstraction levels and also a component implementation.

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