Towards a Mathematical Concept of a Component and its Use.
Manfred Broy · 1997
We deal with the concept of a component considered as a black box that is a physical encapsulation of related services according to a published specification. These services can only be accessed through a consistent and published interface that includes an interaction standard. Such a notion of a component needs a carefully chosen semantic concept of a syntactic and a semantic interface that allows us to provide a precise unambiguous published specification. We present a mathematical model for the interface of components. We demonstrate its use for the modeling of software architectures, interoperability between components, and the process of incremental development. 1. Introduction A descriptive functional semantic model of distributed systems of interacting components is of major interest in many research areas as well as applications of computing science and systems engineering. For the modular, systematic development of systems and a proper method for for the design of s...