Software reuse through a novel representation that supports factorization

Software reuse has received more attention in recent years. However, very often, we still need to re-design and re-develop parts of software, ranging from small to very large size (we shall call them software factors) that have been developed before, for the development of new software systems. These software factors do not fall into any existing implementation constructs. The problem that prevents the reuse of these software factors is the lack of a representation that can represent them separately and compose them together to form a software system. The paper proposes a novel software representation, called the software event net (the SE net), to address the problem. The SE net is based on the high level Petri net with some modification and extension for the specification of events produced in software systems. It applies implicit invocation software architecture in representing a software factor