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:
- Component-based software
- Models and systems for coordination of interaction
- Network models of computing
- Service-oriented computing
- Real-time systems
- Embedded systems
- Formal methods for compositional semantics,
analysis, reasoning, verification, and model-checking