V3Studio: A Component-Based Architecture Modeling Language

Component-based software development (CBSD) has proven to obtain highly reusable, extensible and evolvable designs. This paper presents a model-driven engineering approach to CBSD which revolves around the definition of the V³Studio component-based meta-model and a set of graphical modeling tools implemented to support it. V³Studio has been designed to model the structure and behavior of a wide variety of reactive systems by means of three complementary views, namely: one for describing the components of the architecture (structural view), and two for describing their behavior (coordination and algorithmic views). Dividing the V³Studio meta-model into these three loosely coupled views considerably simplifies the overall design process, allowing designers to reuse previously defined models. In order to show the feasibility and the benefits of the proposal, a simple but complete case study regarding the design of a vision guided robotic system was presented.