Modeling behavior in compositions of software architectural primitives

Software architectures and architectural styles are increasingly used for designing large-scale software systems. Alfa is a framework for the composition of style-based software architectures from a small set of primitives. It models the behavior of architectural components and connectors as orderings among events at their inputs and outputs. Formalizing such behavior is useful for checking conformance of architectures to their styles. We therefore propose a formal approach that uses data-abstract constraint automata to model the behavior of Alfa's compositions, and to verify their behavioral style conformance. We have also developed an automated conformance analyzer for Alfa.