SUPPORTING DECENTRALISED SOFTWARE-INTENSIVE PROCESSES USING ZETA COMPONENT-BASED ARCHITECTURE DESCRIPTION LANGUAGE

摘要

Software engineering is nowadays moving towards an architecture-based development where systems are built by composing or assembling existing components that are often developed independently. This paper presents Zeta component-based approach to build software-intensive processes that are characterised by their complexity, heterogeneity and decentralisation. Indeed software-intensive processes are no longer monolithic as parts of it referred to as processlets may exist and run separately from the others. ZETA is an interaction-based architecture description language intended to design the "software glue" that connects processlets so that their interactions can be managed at runtime. ZETA addresses the contents of interactions through an intentional approach where interactions are guided by intentions that are revoked/maintained given some defined conditions. The underlying theory of the proposed approach is logic-based. The industrial relevance in a decentralised context, is currently being demonstrated based on case studies from the automotive industry within the framework of an ESPRIT IV LTR Project.