Journal of Universal Computer Science

Special Issue on

Compositional Construction and Reasoning Techniques for Software

Guest Editors: F. Arbab and J.N. Kok

Submission deadline: 30 April 2005
Tentative publication date: November 2005



Call For Papers


Complex software systems are intrinsically difficult to conceive, develop, deploy, maintain, and evolve, especially in concurrent and distributed settings. Compositional techniques for construction and analysis of software, such as object-oriented and component-based approaches, have shown to be effective tools for breaking these complexities down to manageable sizes.  The complexity of these systems is confounded in contexts such as real-time and embedded systems, where concurrency and distribution arise not merely due to performance concerns, but rather reflect the inherent requirements and operating constraints of application systems.  Interaction and coordination models that have been developed to tackle these problems often lack the adequate sophistication to accommodate systems where self-organization, emergent behavior, evolution, and interaction (e.g., of proteins and cell functions) comprise their key concerns.  Nevertheless, approaches based on, perhaps new, interaction, coordination, and compositional techniques seem to form a promising basis to meet the challenges of increasingly important emerging areas such as ubiquitous computing, self-organizing self-managing systems, service-oriented computing, and bio-informatics, where interaction, its composition, and its coordination play an explicit central role.

The aim of this special issue is to put together a collection of state of the art and frontier research papers on both theoretical and systems aspects of compositional methods for construction of software.  Special emphasis is on foundational work on systems as well as formal methods for compositional construction and analysis, and on their applications in emerging fields.  The specific topics of interest include, but are not restricted to: