A Framework for Identifying Compositional Conflicts in Component-Based Systems

Component composition is an important objective of software engineering. It promises component reuse and therefore a productivity gain, because of shorter time-to-market and improved quality. Unfortunately, composition is difficult to achieve in practical terms, because of technological incompatibilities and diverging component specifications. The objective of this report is to define an Ontology-Based Framework for Identification of Compositional Conflicts in Component-Based Systems that serves as a basis of component integration. The framework provides a platform independent component model and a customizable basis for conflict identification. Within the framework, conflict identification is based on the analysis of structural and behavioral aspects of component descriptions. It also takes property-based descriptions of communicational requirements and technological aspects into account. Analysis identifies mismatched behavior by evaluating customizable relationships in each context. Examples of predefined relationships are subtypes, simulation and bisimulation as well as a property-based relationship. Properties describe structural and behavioral constraints from a different a more abstract viewpoint. This provides two advantages: properties can be used to transform conceptual models into specific representations covering particular communications requirements, and they allow gaining more information regarding incompletely specified components. The framework’s models and rules are realized in Triple, which is a ’RDF-aware’ extension of F-Logic. The execution environment for these rules is the ODIS repository developed by the Fraunhofer ISST. ODIS provides an environment for interpretation of Triple rules and uses XSB, a deductive knowledge base for rule evaluation.