View article

Software components can give rise to several kinds of architectural mismatches when assembled together in order to form a software system. A formal description of the architecture of the resulting component-based software system may help to detect such architectural mismatches and to single out the components that cause the mismatches. In this article, we concentrate on deadlock-related architectural mismatches arising from three different causes that we identify: incompatibility between two components due to a single interaction, incompatibility between two components due to the combination of several interactions, and lack of interoperability among a set of components forming a cyclic topology. We develop a process algebra-based architectural description language called PADL, which deals with all three causes through an architectural compatibility check and an architectural interoperability check relying …