Semi-Automated Software Composition Through Generated Components

Abstract

Software composition has been studied as a subject of state based planning for decades. Existing composition approaches that are efficient enough to be used in practice are limited to sequential arrangements of software components. This restriction dramatically reduces the number of composition problems that can be solved. However, there are many composition problems that could be solved by existing approaches if they had a possibility to combine components in very simple non-sequential ways. To this end, we present an approach that arranges not only basic components but also composite components. Composite components enhance the structure of the composition by conditional control flows. Through algorithms that are written by experts, composite components are automatically generated before the composition process starts. Therefore, our approach is not a substitute for existing composition algorithms but complements them with a preprocessing step. We verified the validity of our approach through implementation of the presented algorithms.