Unified Modeling of Active and Reactive Components for Real-Time Systems

In component-based architecture, a component is a unit of computation or a data store. Connectors are architectural building blocks used to model interactions among components. However, in some particular complex real-time systems, it is non-determinate and confused to distinguish some modules functioning as components as well as connectors. Therefore, a unified model method is demanded to describe those modules. In this paper, we propose a method to divide components into reactive and active component based on providing or requiring services when they interact with each other. A reactive component provides services and could call services of other reactive components. Active components call reactive components and are used to coordinate reactive components. Active and reactive timed automata are unified defined by extending timed automata to denote them. Then, we redefine the component composition language and present the semantics of composition of timed automata. A case study of Train Integrity Detection System illustrates the usage of our unified models for active and reactive components.