Flexible Semantic-Preserving Flattening of Hierarchical Component Models

Hierarchical component models allow to better manage system design complexity compared to flat component models. However, many analysis techniques lack support for dealing with hierarchical models. This paper presents a general approach to use existing analysis on hierarchical component systems by means of a flattening transformation. The transformation can be partially applied, which provides a possibility for tradeoffs between analysis scalability, result precision and reusability concerns. The general approach has been implemented and evaluated in the context of ProCom, a hierarchical component model for real-time embedded systems. As a result, the paper describes a flattening transformation which preserves the ProCom operational semantics and presents the related optimizations.