A Graph based architectural (re)configuration language

For several different reasons, such as changes in the business or technological environment, the configuration of a system may need to evolve during the execution. Support for such evolution can be conceived in terms of a language for specifying the dynamic reconfiguration of systems. In this paper, continuing our work on the development of a formal platform for architectural design, we present a high-level language to describe architectures and for operating changes over a configuration (i.e., an architecture instance), such as adding, removing or substituting components or interconnections. The language follows an imperative style and builds on a semantic domain established in previous work. Therein, we model architectures through categorical diagrams and dynamic reconfiguration through algebraic graph rewriting

The SENSORIA reference modelling language

This chapter provides an overview of SRML - the Sensoria Reference Modelling Language. Our focus will be on the language primitives that SRML offers for modelling business services and activities, the methodological approach that SRML supports, and the mathematical semantics the underpins the modelling approach, including techniques for qualitative and quantitative analysis. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

A reification calculus for model-oriented software specification

This paper presents a transformational approach to the derivation of implementations from model-oriented specifications of abstract data types. The purpose of this research is to reduce the number of formal proofs required in model refinement, which hinder software development. It is shown to be appli- cable to the transformation of models written in Meta-iv (the specification lan- guage of Vdm) towards their refinement into, for example, Pascal or relational DBMSs. The approach includes the automatic synthesis of retrieve functions between models, and data-type invariants. The underlying algebraic semantics is the so-called final semantics “`a la Wand”: a specification “is” a model (heterogeneous algebra) which is the final ob ject (up to isomorphism) in the category of all its implementations. The transformational calculus approached in this paper follows from exploring the properties of finite, recursively defined sets. This work extends the well-known strategy of program transformation to model transformation, adding to previous work on a transformational style for operation- decomposition in META-IV. The model-calculus is also useful for improving model-oriented specifications.(undefined

Higher-order architectural connectors

We develop a notion of higher-order connector towards supporting the systematic construction of architectural connectors for software design. A higher-order connector takes connectors as parameters and allows for services such as security protocols and fault-tolerance mechanisms to be superposed over the interactions that are handled by the connectors passed as actual arguments. The notion is first illustrated over CommUnity, a parallel program design language that we have been using for formalizing aspects of architectural design. A formal, algebraic semantics is then presented which is independent of any Architectural Description Language. Finally, we discuss how our results can impact software design methods and tools

Consistency of service composition

We address the problem of ensuring that, when an application executing a service binds to a service that matches required functional properties, both the application and the service can work together, i.e., their composition is consistent. Our approach is based on a component algebra for service-oriented computing in which the configurations of applications and of services are modelled as asynchronous relational nets typed with logical interfaces. The techniques that we propose allow for the consistency of composition to be guaranteed based on properties of service orchestrations (implementations) and interfaces that can be checked at design time, which is essential for supporting the levels of dynamicity required by run-time service binding. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

Sensoria Patterns: Augmenting Service Engineering with Formal Analysis, Transformation and Dynamicity

The IST-FET Integrated Project Sensoria is developing a novel comprehensive approach to the engineering of service-oriented software systems where foundational theories, techniques and methods are fully integrated into pragmatic software engineering processes. The techniques and tools of Sensoria encompass the whole software development cycle, from business and architectural design, to quantitative and qualitative analysis of system properties, and to transformation and code generation. The Sensoria approach takes also into account reconfiguration of service-oriented architectures (SOAs) and re-engineering of legacy systems. In this paper we give first a short overview of Sensoria and then present a pattern language for augmenting service engineering with formal analysis, transformation and dynamicity. The patterns are designed to help software developers choose appropriate tools and techniques to develop service-oriented systems with support from formal methods. They support the whole development process, from the modelling stage to deployment activities and give an overview of many of the research areas pursued in the Sensoria project