Static analysis of aspect interaction and composition in component models

Abstract

Component based software engineering and aspect orientation are claimed to be two complementary approaches. While the former ensures the modularity and the reusability of software entities, the latter enables the modularity of crosscutting concerns that cannot be modularized as regular components. Nowadays, several approaches and frameworks are dedicated to integrate aspects into component models. However, when several aspects are woven, aspects may interact with each other which often results in undesirable behavior. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we show how aspectized component models can be formally modeled in UPPAAL model checker in order to detect negative interactions (a.k.a., interferences) among aspects. Second, we provide an extendible catalog of composition operators used for aspect composition. We illustrate our general approach with an airport Internet service example. © 2011 ACM.