Towards a “Periodic Table of Component Models”

When applying model-driven architecture to component models, a significant issue is to address challenges such as component architecture transformation, compositional consistency analysis, and component code synthesis in a reusable way. Mostly, this is due to the substantial differences among abstractions of component models. As a remedy, the paper presents Periodic Table of Component Models (PTOCM), a novel method for defining (abstract) component meta-models. The key idea is to introduce orthogonal dimensions of variability among the component models with respect to composition, grouping models into component model families. Each family is associated with a rigorously-defined abstract meta-model. PTOCM allows for providing a standardized meta-model skeleton for a component model, avoiding pitfalls when designing a component model, and defining generic transformations of component architectures. This work was partially supported by the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic project P202/11/0312. D3S Technical Report no. D3S-TR-2012-07 CONTENTS