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International Workshop on Formal Aspects of Component Software

FACS 2012: Formal Aspects of Component Software pp 152–169Cite as

Xcd – Modular, Realizable Software Architectures 

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 7684))

Abstract

Connector-Centric Design (Xcd) is centred around a new formal architectural description language, focusing mainly on complex connectors. Inspired by Wright and BIP, Xcd aims to cleanly separate in a modular manner the high-level functional, interaction, and control system behaviours. This can aid in both increasing the understandability of architectural specifications and the reusability of components and connectors themselves. Through the independent specification of control behaviours, Xcd allows designers to experiment more easily with different design decisions early on, without having to modify the functional behaviour specifications (components) or the interaction ones(connectors).

At the same time Xcd attempts to ease the architectural specification by following (and extending) a Design-by-Contract approach, which is more familiar to software developers than process algebras like CSP or languages like BIP that are closer to synchronous/hardware specification languages. Xcd extends Design-by-Contract (i) by separating component contracts into functional and interaction sub-contracts, and (ii) by allowing service consumers to specify their own contractual clauses. Xcd connector specifications are completely decentralized, foregoing Wright’s connector glue, to ensure their realizability by construction.

This work has been partially supported by the EU project FP7-257367 IoT@Work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Informatics, City University London, London, EC1V 0HB, U.K.

    Christos Kloukinas & Mert Ozkaya

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  1. Christos Kloukinas
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  2. Mert Ozkaya
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  1. NASA Ames Research Center, Mail Stop 269-2, 94035, Moffett Field, CA, USA

    Corina S. Păsăreanu

  2. INRIA Grenoble - Rhône-Alpes/CONVECS, 655, avenue de l’Europe, 38330, Montbonnot Saint-Martin, France

    Gwen Salaün

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Kloukinas, C., Ozkaya, M. (2013). Xcd – Modular, Realizable Software Architectures . In: Păsăreanu, C.S., Salaün, G. (eds) Formal Aspects of Component Software. FACS 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7684. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35861-6_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35861-6_10

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