Formal specification of CORBA-based distributed objects and behaviors

A distributed object system consists of a set of objects that interact by invoking services to one another. For successful cooperation between these objects, they must have capabilities that enable them to represent, use and share information. Existing middleware technologies define the remote object classes in terms of their interfaces only and do not give any semantic or behavioral specifications of the remote objects resident in clients and servers. This paper formalizes the behavior of distributed objects based on the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). The capturing of information by each distributed object can be compared to the way information is captured using the Object-Attribute-Relation (OAR) model in which information about an object is represented by a 3-tuple (0, A, R), where O represents the object ID used to identify an object, A the set of object attributes used to denote detailed characteristics of an object and R a set of defined relationships used to make connections to other objects. Real-Time Process Algebra (RTPA) is used to model the architecture of a distributed system. Based on this architecture, a formal specification of the behavior of the distributed objects is presented through a case study.