Metadata support for safe component upgrades

Component platforms play a major role in current distributed information systems. As these systems evolve, components need to be upgraded without breaking the consistency of component interconnections. In this paper we present a method for the support of automated safe upgrades of black-box components. It relates component versioning with indication of changes between revisions of the same component and uses pre-computed information stored in component meta-data. We show how this information is derived from component specifications and used to speed up pre-upgrade checks.