Specification, Simulation, and Verification of Component Connectors in Reo

Coordination and composition of components is an essential concern in component-based software engineering. In this paper, we present an operational semantics for a component composition language called Reo. Reo connectors exogenously compose and coordinate the interactions among individual components, that unawarely comprise a complex system, into a coherent collaboration. The formal semantics we present here paves the way for studying the behavior of component composition mechanisms rigorously. To demonstrate the feasibility of such a rigorous approach, we give a faithful translation of Reo semantics into the Maude term rewriting language. This translation allows us to exploit the rewriting engine and the modelchecking module in the Maude tool-set to symbolically run and model-check the behavior of Reo connectors.