Composition of software artifacts modelled using Colored Petri nets

In this work we introduce a new formal model for software components supporting behavioral interpretability based on temporal logic, Petri nets, model checking, and an assume-guarantee strategy to specify and reason about the composition of concurrent component systems. The formal specification and verification strategies, methods, and techniques presented in this work contribute to the development of more dependable component-based software systems, in a modular way. An approach based on two complementary formalisms, Hierarchical Colored Petri Nets (HCPN) and temporal logic, is introduced. HCPN are used to visualize the structure and model the behavior of software architectures and components, and temporal logic is used to specify the required properties of software architectures and component interfaces. (c) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.