Derivation of component designs from global specifications

Abstract

The use of distributed systems is growing more and more, given the advantages that they present, particularly the powerful computational capabilities that they provide. However, one challenge of distributed computing is ensuring that once the different system components are collaborating, their combined behavior will result in the behavior that was originally intended for the global system, without coordination conflicts. This thesis deals with automating the process of deriving the components behaviors of distributed systems, starting from the description of that global system, defined as a UML Activity Diagram. The derived component specifications are produced as Activity Diagrams, and provided to the user in a graphical form. The generated components diagrams include the exchange of the necessary coordination messages. We also explain through many test cases the importance and purpose of these coordination messages. Besides, tests were conducted to verify that the obtained components designs correspond to the intended results.