Towards an architectural approach for the dynamic and automatic composition of software components

In a component-based software system the components are spec-ified, designed and implemented with the intention to be reused, and are assembled in various contexts in order to produce a mul-titude of software systems. However, this ideal scenario is not al-ways the case, e.g., the integration with legacy components. In this context, one main problem in component assembly arises. It is re-lated to the ability to automatically and efficiently (i.e., by reducing the state-explosion phenomenon) synthesize an assembly code for a set of, possibly incompatible, software components. Moreover, this assembly should be able to evolve when things change and to be correct-by-construction, i.e., despite the changes, it always en-sures a set of properties of interest. In this paper we propose a Software Architecture (SA) based approach in which architectural analysis and code synthesis are combined together in order to ef-ficiently and correctly assemble a system out of a set of already implemented components. The approach can be equally applied to efficiently manage the whole re-factoring of the system when one or more components needs to be substituted, still maintaining the required properties. The specified and validated system SA is used as starting point for the derivation of adaptors required to correctly replace components in the composed system. The approach is ap-plied and validated over an explanatory example concerning with a “cooling water pipe ” system. 1