Verifying Component and Connector Models against Crosscutting Structural Views

TL;DR

This paper presents polynomial-time algorithms for verifying component and connector models against structural views, with witness generation and natural language explanations to aid engineers, supported by a prototype and empirical evaluation.

Contribution

It introduces efficient algorithms for C&C model verification against views, including witness generation and natural language explanations, enhancing analysis and understanding.

Findings

Algorithms are polynomial-time and scalable.

Witnesses and explanations improve user understanding.

Prototype demonstrates practical effectiveness.

Abstract

The structure of component and connector (C&C) models, which are used in many application domains of software engineering, consists of components at different containment levels, their typed input and output ports, and the connectors between them. C&C views, presented in [24], can be used to specify structural properties of C&C models in an expressive and intuitive way. In this work we address the verification of a C&C model against a C&C view and present efficient (polynomial) algorithms to decide satisfaction. A unique feature of our work, not present in existing approaches to checking structural properties of C&C models, is the generation of witnesses for satisfaction/non-satisfaction and of short naturallanguage texts, which serve to explain and formally justify the verification results and point the engineer to its causes. A prototype tool and an evaluation over four example systems with multiple views, performance and scalability experiments, as well as a user study of the usefulness of the witnesses for engineers, demonstrate the contribution of our work to the state-of-the-art in component and connector modeling and analysis.