Semantic Analysis of Component-aspect Dynamism for Connector-based Architecture Styles

Architecture Description Languages usually specify software architectures in the levels of types and instances. Components instantiate component types by parameterization and type conformance. Behavioral analysis of dynamic architectures needs to deal with the uncertainty of actual configurations of components, even if the type-level architectural descriptions are explicitly provided. This paper addresses this verification difficulty for connector-based architecture styles, in which all communication channels of a system are between components and a connector. The contribution of this paper is two-fold: (1) We propose a process-algebraic model, in which the main architectural concepts (such as component type and component conformance) and several fundamental architectural properties (i.e. ~ deadlock-freedom, non-starvation, conservation, and completeness) are formulated. (2) We demonstrate that the state space of verification of these properties can be reduced from the entire universe of possible configurations to specific configurations that are fixed according to the type-level architectural descriptions.