Connector Rewriting with High-Level Replacement Systems

Abstract

Reo is a language for coordinating autonomous components in distributed environments. Coordination in Reo is performed by circuit-like connectors, which are constructed from primitive channels with well-defined behavior. These channels are mobile, i.e. can be dynamically created and reconfigured at run-time. Based on these language features, we introduce a high-level transformation system for Reo. We show how transformations of Reo connectors can be defined using the theory of high-level replacement (HLR) systems. This leads to a powerful notion of dynamic connector reconfiguration in Reo. Moreover, the rewrite rules are naturally expressed in Reo's visual syntax for connectors. Applications of this framework are manifold, due to the generality of the field of coordination. In this paper we provide an example from the area of Service-oriented Computing.