On refinement of software architectures

Although increasingly popular, software component techniques still lack suitable formal foundations on top of which rigorous methodologies for the description and analysis of software architectures could be built. This paper aims to contribute in this direction: building on previous work by the authors on coalgebraic semantics, it discusses component refinement at three different but interrelated levels: behavioural, syntactic, i.e., relative to component interfaces, and architectural. Software architectures are defined through component aggregation. On the other hand, such aggregations, no matter how large and complex they are, can also be dealt with as components themselves, which paves the way to a discipline of hierarchical design. In this context, a major contribution of this paper is the introduction of a set of rules for architectural refinement. Keywords: Software component, software architecture, refinement, coalgebra.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT

Security Issues in Component-based Design

Abstract We propose a behavioural extension of the concept of interface of components. We aim to uniformly reason about correctness properties of both closed and open component-based systems. The characterizing feature of our approach is that we perform a local analysis over finite fragments of interactions naturally modeling mobility and coordination aspects. We present a semi-automatic technique that reduces the verification of security properties of protocols to the verification of correctness in component-based systems

A formal specification of the Fractal component model in Alloy

This report contains a formal specification of the Fractal component model using the Alloy specification language. The report covers all the elements of the (informal) reference specification of the Fractal model. It provides a truly language-independent specification of the Fractal model, and lifts the ambiguities of the reference specification