Guaranteing Coherent Software Systems when Composing Coordinated Components

Abstract

Latest trends in coordination models and languages suggest that it must be supported the separated specification of and the dynamic change of coordination constraints. However, little attention has been paid to guaranteeing that, the application of a separately specified coordination pattern to a set of encapsulated objects, or changing the coordination constraints of a software system at run-time, will not produce semantic errors. These kinds of errors would produce an unpredictable system and, consequently, a lack of software quality. In this paper, a method of generating formal interpretable specifications for the reproduction of coordinated environments is presented. The benefits provided by this method are: (i) easy specification, verification and detection of inconsistencies when composing coordination and functional components, (ii) easy verification and detection of inconsistencies where coordination policies are changed dynamically and (iii) simulation of coordinated behaviors. The method is based on the use of the formal specification language Maude (as a simulation tool) and a coordination model. Although the paper adopts Coordinated Roles, it is also shown how the method can be adapted to other compositional coordination models.

This work is supported by CICYT under contract TIC 99-1083-C02-02 and Junta de Extremadura under contract IPR98A041