Modelling and Refinement of Component-based Software Systems: A Coalgebraic Perspective

Title:Modelling and Refinement of Component-based Software Systems: A Coalgebraic Perspective
Speaker:Dr. Sun Meng Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI), Amsterdam, Netherlands
Time: 10:00am, Tuesday June 26
Venue: Lecture room, Lab for Computer Science, Level 3 Building #5, Institute of Software, CAS

Abstract: Although increasingly popular, software component techniques still lack suitable formal foundations on top of which rigorous methodologies for the description and analysis of component-based systems could be built. This talk is about my thesis work and aims to contribute in this direction: building on the previous work “components as coalgebras” of L. Barbosa on coalgebraic model of components, we will discuss a heterogeneous calculi for components as coalgebras, which can be used in combining components with different behavior patterns explicitly specified. Furthermore, we introduce component refinement at three different but interrelated levels: behavioural, syntactic, i.e., relative to component interfaces, and architectural. Software architectures are defined through component aggregation. On the other hand, such aggregations, no matter how large and complex they are, can also be dealt with as components themselves, which paves the way to a discipline of hierarchical design. In this context, the major contribution of our work is a semantic characterization of refinement for state-based components, parametric on a strong monad intended to capture components’ behavioural patterns, and the introduction of a set of rules for refinement. Moreover, we present some applications of the coalgebraic model of components, including the specification and refinement of components in RSL and the coalgebraic semantics for UML view models.

About the speaker:
Dr. Sun Meng is a Scientific Staff Member at Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI), Amsterdam, Netherlands. Before that, he worked as a postdoc research fellow at School of Computing, National University of Singapore from March 2005 to April 2006, and as a visiting fellow at International Institute for Software Technology, United Nations University (UNU/IIST) from March 2002 to June 2003. He graduated with his PhD from School of Mathematical Science, Peking University in January 2005. His research interests includes category theory, coalgebra theory, formal approaches to software engineering, component techniques, coordination models and languages, service-oriented computing and refinement technology. He has written and published about 20 research papers.
For further information we refer to http://www.cwi.nl/~sun.