An Enhanced Model for Component Interfaces to Support Automatic and Dynamic Adaption

This paper presents a new model of software component interfaces, using an extension of finite states machines to describe (a) the protocol to use a component’s offered services, and (b) the sequences of calls to the external services the component requires to fulfill its offered services. With this model we integrate information into the interface of a software component to: (a) Check whether a component will be used correctly in its environment during system integration (i.e., before the component is actually used). (b) Adapt the interface of a component which describes the component’s offered services, in case the environment does not offer all resources the component requires to offer all its services. In this case the adapted component still offers a subset of its services, to the contrary of todays component systems, which do not allow any integration in this case at all.