An Object-Oriented Component Model for Heterogeneous Nets

Many distributed applications can be understood in terms of components interacting in an open environment. This interaction is not always uniform as the network may consist of subnets with different quality: Some components are tightly connected with order preservation of communicated messages, whereas others are more loosely connected such that overtaking of messages and even message loss may occur. Furthermore, certain components may communicate over wireless networks, where sending and receiving must be synchronized, since the wireless medium cannot buffer messages. This paper proposes a formal framework for such systems, which allows high-level modeling and formal analysis of distributed systems where interaction is managed by a variety of nets, including wireless ones. We introduce a simple modeling language for objectoriented components, extending the Creol language. An operational semantics for the language is defined in rewriting logic, which directly provides an executable implementation in Maude.