Fine-grained contract negotiation for hierarchical software components

Component-based development addresses the complexity of large applications by building software systems from reusable software components. To support reuse and successfully combine units of software, the contractual approach turns out to be well-suited to specify and to verify components and their interactions. However, as contracts must support functional and extra-functional aspects, they are frequently challenged by fluctuations in extra-functional properties and dynamic reconfigurations of components. In this paper, we propose a negotiation model in which components have clearly identified roles and interact in order to automatically restore the validity of contracts. The negotiation model currently supports a concession-based negotiation policy and is well-suited to behavioral contracts based on executable assertions. This model is integrated into ConFract, a contracting system for the fractal hierarchical component model.