Model-driven design of object and component systems

Abstract

The notion of software engineering implies that software design and production should be based on the types of theoretical foundations and practical disciplines that are established in the traditional branches of engineering. The goal is to make development of complex software systems more predictable and the systems developed more trustworthy - safe, secure and dependable. A number of theories have been well developed in the past half a century, including Abstract Data Types, Hoare Logic, Process Calculi, and I/O automata, and those alike. Based on them, techniques and tools have been developed for software specification, refinement and verification. However, the theoretically sound techniques and tools have not been seamlessly integrated in practical software development, and their impact upon commonly-used software systems is still far from convincing to software engineering practitioners. This is clearly reflected by the challenges of their applications in engineering large-scale systems, including Cyber- Physical Systems (CPS), Networks of Things and Cloud-Based Systems, that have multi-dimensional complexities. Indeed, students are not often shown how the theories, and their underpinned techniques and tools, can better inform the software engineering they are traditionally taught. The purpose of this course to demonstrate such an effort. We present a model-driven design framework for component-based and object-oriented software systems. We identify a set of UML notations and textual descriptions for representing different abstractions of software artefacts produced in different development stages. These abstractions, their relations and manipulations all have formalisations in the rCOS formal method of component and object systems. The aim is to allow the advantage of using precise models for development better appreciated. We organise the lecture notes into three chapters, each having a title page but all the references to literature are given at the end of Part III.