Contract-based component system design

Component technology tries to solve many problems of today´s software industry practice: the productivity and produced quality should be increased and a better infrastructure for maintenance of the products is promised. The integration of off-the-shelf components to build customized products allows us to source out the development of general purpose components. A crucial prerequisite for the intended scenario of component usage is their strong separation. Especially in a distributed environment, synchronization aspects are of great importance to identify a suitable architecture and to decide whether a component matches some requirements. The presented approach allows us to model the synchronization aspect of contracts in a flexible manner including a whole spectrum of different degrees of preciseness from declaration of abstraction barriers to complete synchronization specifications describing the explicit behavior. The used Petri net based OCoN behavior specification formalism is structurally embedded in the UML and supports analysis and design of component systems.