Component-based software architectures: a framework based on inheritance of behavior

Software architectures shift the focus of developers from lines-of-code to coarser-grained components and their interconnection structure. Unlike fine-grained objects, these components typically encompass business functionality and need to be aware of the underlying business processes. Hence, the interface of a component should reflect relevant parts of the business process and the software architecture should emphasize the coordination among components. To shed light on these issues, we provide a framework for component-based software architectures focusing on the process perspective. The interface of a component is described in terms of Petri nets and projection inheritance is used to determine whether a component “fits”. Compositionality and substitutability are key issues for component-based development. This paper provides new results to effectively deal with these issues.