Composition of Business Components Based on Behavior for Software Reuse

41 Abstract The capability to easily find useful components has become increasingly importance in software reuse field. Current researches on component retrieval are mostly limited to retrieve the component whose function is most close to the user requirement. However, in the process of component retrieval, we frequently face the problem that the individual component can’t completely meet user’s requirement. This paper proposes a method of composition of business components based on behavior, our purpose is to settle the problem that individual component can’t completely meet the user requirement. In this study, deterministic finite state machine is used for modeling the behavior specification of business component. The composition of business components can be represented as the product of deterministic finite state machines whose result can be regarded as a nondeterministic finite state machine. Therefore the problem of component retrieval can be transformed into the matching between nondeterministic finite state machine and deterministic finite state machine, and behavior mapping graph is used to check the existence of composition of business components. Through the composition of business components, we can extract the behaviors in accord with user requirement from a set of candidate business components, which increase the reuse degree and reduce the cost of software development. Keyword: business component, composition, behavior specification matching, behavior mapping graph