Invasive Composition by Transformation Systems

Introduction The most important strategy to deal with complex systems in computer science is the divide and conquer design paradigm. It works by recursively breaking down a problem into sub-problems until they become simple enough to be solved directly. The solutions to the sub-problems are then composed to give a solution for the whole problem. There are two kinds of composition: non-invasive and invasive composition. The non-invasive composition mechanisms are applicable as long as the kind of components to be composed fit in the dominate decomposition. However it has become clear that there are multiple equally valid and useful decompositions of the same software. In order words, there are often components that do fit and violate the dominate decomposition. There are two ways of dealing with this problem. One approach is to express a software system as a set of multi-dimensional concerns like HyperSpace [OT00]. Another approach is to keep a single dominate decomposition and expres