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Context Synthesis

  • Chapter
Formal Methods for Eternal Networked Software Systems (SFM 2011)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 6659))

Abstract

With the advent of component-based and distributed software development, service-oriented computing, and other such concepts, components are no longer viewed as parts of specific systems, but rather as open systems that can be reused, or connected dynamically, in a variety of environments to form larger systems. Reasoning about components as open systems is different from reasoning about closed systems, since property satisfaction may depend on the context in which a component may be introduced.

Component interfaces are an important feature of open sytems, since interfaces summarize the expectations that a component has from the contexts in which it gets introduced. Traditionally, component interfaces have been of a purely syntactic form, including information about the services/methods that can be invoked on the component, and their signatures, meaning the numbers and types of arguments and their return values. However, there is a recognized need for richer interfaces that capture additional aspects of a component. For example, interfaces may characterize legal sequences of invocations to component services.

Generating compact and yet useful component interfaces is a challenging task to perform manually. Over the last decade, several approaches have been developed for performing context synthesis, i.e., generating component interfaces automatically. This tutorial mostly reviews such techniques developed by the authors, but also discusses alternative techniques for context synthesis.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley/, USA

    Corina S. Păsăreanu

  2. NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA, 94035, USA

    Dimitra Giannakopoulou

Authors
  1. Dimitra Giannakopoulou
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  2. Corina S. Păsăreanu
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Scienze di Base e Fondamenti, Università di Urbino “Carlo Bo”, Piazza della Repubblica 13, 61029, Urbino, Italy

    Marco Bernardo

  2. INRIA Paris-Rocquencourt, France

    Valérie Issarny

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Giannakopoulou, D., Păsăreanu, C.S. (2011). Context Synthesis. In: Bernardo, M., Issarny, V. (eds) Formal Methods for Eternal Networked Software Systems. SFM 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6659. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21455-4_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21455-4_6

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-21454-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-21455-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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