Verification of Distributed Hierarchical Components

Abstract

Components allow to design applications in a modular way by enforcing a strong separation of concerns. In distributed systems this separation of concerns have to be composed with distribution of controls due to asynchrony. This article relies on Fractive, an implementation of the Fractal component model allowing to unify the notion of components with the notion of activity. This article shows how to build automatically the behaviour of a distributed component system. Starting from the functional specification of primitive components, we generate a specification of a system of components, their asynchronous communications, and their control. We then show how to use such a specification to verify properties specific to components, reconfigurations, or asynchrony. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.