BIP: Language and Tools for Component-based Construction

A central idea in systems engineering is that complex systems are built by assembling components. System designers deal with a large variety of components, each having different characteristics, from a large variety of viewpoints, each highlighting different dimensions of a system. A central problem is the meaningful composition of heterogeneous components to ensure their correct interoperation. BIP (Behavior, Interaction, Priority) has been designed to overcome the difficulties of state-of-the-art componentbased approaches. BIP provides a language and a theory for incremental composition of heterogeneous components, ensuring correctness-by-construction for essential system properties such as mutual exclusion, deadlockfreedom and progress. Besides, it enables formal verification. BIP is the outcome of more than five years of research on a theory for compositional modelling real-time systems capable of handling urgency, parallel composition, priorities and deadlock-freedom by construction.