Formalizing Composable Software Systems — A Research Agenda

Flexibility is achieved in open systems by adopting software architectures that allow software components to be easily plugged in, adapted and exchanged. But open systems are generally concurrent, distributed and heterogeneous in addition to being adaptable. Ad hoc approaches to specifying component frameworks can lead to unexpected semantic conflicts. We propose, instead, to develop a rigorous foundation for composable software systems by a series of experiments in modelling concurrent and object-based software abstractions as composable, communicating processes. Eventually we hope to identify and realize the most useful compositional idioms as a composition language for open systems specification.