A lightweight formal approach for component reuse

Abstract

Component reuse is playing a crucial role in today software design. However, the current approaches used in industry are quite effort-consuming due to the lack of an effectivemechanismto describe and capture semantics in software components. In this paper, we propose a formal approach to overcome this problem, which is based on First-Order Logic (FOL). In one hand, FOL is sufficiently expressive to describe semantics in various software domains, from generic to specific ones. In the other hand, FOL also supports automatic searching, matching and inferring mechanism by computer-based tools and provers. Thus, our approach both effectively supports expert human to describe system components and computer programs to reuse those components, and even to compose new components from existing ones for further usage.We realize our approach as a framework which can be applied in various situations of software designs, as illustrated in some case studies.