Towards a Mathematical Concept of a Component and Its Use Keynote Speech at the Components’ Users Conference CUC’96 Revised and Extended Version

We deal with the concept of a component considered as a black box that is a physical encapsulation of related services according to a published specification. These services can only be accessed through a consistent and published interface that includes an interaction standard. Such a notion of a component needs a carefully chosen semantic concept of a syntactic and a semantic interface that allows us to provide a precise unambiguous published specification. We present a mathematical model for the interface of components. We demonstrate its use for the modeling of software architectures, interoperability between components, and the process of incremental development.