Modelling Parametric Contracts and the State Space of Composite Components by Graph Grammars

Modeling the dependencies between provided and required services within a software component is necessary for several reasons, such as automated component adaptation and architectural dependency analysis. Parametric contracts for software components specify such dependencies and were successfully used for automated protocol adaptation and quality of service prediction. In this paper, a novel model for parametric contracts based on graph grammars is presented and a first definition of the compositionality of parametric contracts is given. Compared to the previously used finite state machine based formalism, the graph grammar formalism allows a more elegant formulation of parametric contract applications and considerably simpler implementations.