Connectors Synthesis for Deadlock-Free Component-Based Architectures

Abstract

Nowadays component-based technologies offer straightforward ways of building applications from existing components. Although these technologies might differ in terms of the level of heterogeneity among components they support, e.g. CORBA or COM versus J2EE, they all suffer the problem of dynamic integration. That is, once components are successfully integrated in a uniform context how is it possible to check, control and assess that the dynamic behavior of the resulting application will not deadlock? The authors propose an architectural, connector-based approach to this problem. We compose a system in such a way that it is possible to check whether and why the system deadlocks. Depending on the kind of deadlock, we have a strategy that automatically operates on the connector part of the system architecture in order to obtain a suitably equivalent version of the system which is deadlock-free.