In April 2016 Manchester eScholar was replaced by the University of Manchester’s new Research Information Management System, Pure. In the autumn the University’s research outputs will be available to search and browse via a new Research Portal. Until then the University’s full publication record can be accessed via a temporary portal and the old eScholar content is available to search and browse via this archive.

Related resources

Search for item elsewhere

University researcher(s)

Academic department(s)

Interaction Patterns as Composite Connectors in Component-based Software Development

Stepan, Petr

[Thesis]. Manchester, UK: The University of Manchester; 2014.

Access to files

FULL-TEXT.PDF (pdf)

Abstract

In current component models, interaction aspects of system behaviour are mostly specified by components, rather than by composition mechanisms, due to the fact that most composition mechanisms cannot express complex interactions. Consequently current component models do not enjoy the benefits that arise from separating the specification of computation from the specification of interaction in software architecture.This thesis investigates the possibility of representing recurring patterns of interaction as composition mechanisms (and other associated component model entities), as distinct from components that define computation; these composition mechanisms would appear as first-class entities in architectures, and can be stored in and reused from repositories.To this end, we have defined a novel, control-driven and data-driven component model that strictly separates computation from interaction. To represent interaction patterns in this model, we have defined composite connectors that can encapsulate control flow and data flow and can be reused via repositories in different contexts. We have also developed a prototype implementation of the component model, and carried out a case study from the reactive control systems domain in order to evaluate the feasibility of our approach. Comparison with related work shows that our composite connectors improve the state of the art in component-based interaction modelling (i) by specifying control flow and data flow explicitly and separately in software architecture; and (ii) by increasing the reuse potential of interaction patterns compared to patterns that are represented by components only.