Specification of an Architecture Meta-Model - SPES 2020

Specification of an Architecture Meta-Model
context PortSpecification inv notEmptyUnlessRealization:
self .interactionPoint→isEmpty() implies self .isRealization()
2. A PortSpecification owns either Services or Flows as its interaction point, but
not both.
Formal OCL constraint TBD.
2.1.17.2 InteractionPoint {abstract}
InteractionPoint is an abstract class. It has two sub-classes: Flow and Service. Interaction
points aggregate together in a port specification, which is used to type a port. For
any rich component that owns such a port, we also informally say that this component
owns the interaction points: flows and services, of the corresponding port specification.
An interaction point can be referred to as an end of a binding that binds other
ends referring to other interaction points. We say these interaction points are bound.
There are two types of bindings: flow bindings and service bindings, to bind flows to
flows, and services to services respectively. For the semantics of bound interaction
points, please refer to individual sub-classes.
Moreover, an interaction point can also be referred to as an end of a link where the
other end referring to a block pin with compatible meta-type, namely flow to flow pin
and service to service pin. In this case, the behavior of the owning component on the
interaction point is the same as the behavior of the block on the pin. An interaction
point is a named element.
Generalizations: NamedElement
Aggregations
• portSpecification : PortSpecification [1] The port specification that owns the
interaction points.
2.1.17.3 Flow
A flow specifies an interaction point. A flow is characterized by its data type, its kind,
and its direction. The data type defines the type of values that appear on the flow. The
kind defines when values are available on the flow, and how they change. And the
direction defines whether the owning rich component does input/output/both on the
flow.
Bound flows can be considered as one shared communication point among the owning
components. As a consequence, bound flows always have the same values at any
time.
A flow inherits from NavigableFeature. This allows it to initialize flows within the
body of an Initializer.
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