Towards an architectural approach for the dynamic and automatic composition of software components

Roughly speaking, a component-based software system is an assembly of reusable components, designed to meet the system requirements identified during the architecting phase. Components are specified, designed and implemented with the intention to be reused, and are assembled in various contexts in order to produce a multitude of software systems. The correct functioning of a component-based system depends on both the properties of the single components and the properties of the assembly code. One main problem in component assembly is related to the ability to establish properties on the assembly code by only assuming a limited knowledge of the single component properties. Our answer to this problem is a Software Architecture (SA) based approach in which standard and synthesis-oriented architectural analysis are combined together in order to efficiently and correctly assemble a system out of a set of already implemented components. Our method model-checks the SA of the system respect to desired requirements and assumes the SA as starting point for the synthesis-oriented process. This process is performed to automatically derive a dynamic and correct component assembly. Although in the system life-cycle components change the SA does not change (if the requirements still remain unmodified). Thus, the SA can be used as starting point for deriving adaptors to correctly replace (at run-time) components in the composed system.