A Behavioral Model for Composition of Software Components

Abstract

Engineering of component based software systems requires a formal model for its foundation. Virtually all contemporary component models use some form of object oriented method invocation for their component composition semantics. In contrast, Abstract Behavior Types (ABT) offer a simpler model of components and their composition. Reo is an exogenous coordination language that provides a miadleware for dynamically reconfigurable component composition on distributed, mobile platforms. The ABT model serves as a unifying formalism to express the behavior of Reo connectors, as well as that of components. By examples, we show the expressive power of Reo, and the applicability of the ABT model.