A compositional claim-based component certification procedure

Component-based software construction is of much interest in software engineering due to its promise of black-box composition and independent deployment. Because of this black-box nature, users of components must be concerned with their trustworthiness, in particular when third parties are involved. Component certification is used to improve trust, usually relating the component to the party that made it. In order to support predictable assembly the certification procedure should also address extra-functional properties. In addition, certificates should remain valid across certain compositions. We present a certification procedure in the context of the ROBOCOP component architecture. We discuss specific requirements, introduce terminology and present a solution.