A Calculus of Consistent Component-based Software Updates

Abstract: It is important to enable reasoning about the meaning and possible effects of updates to ensure that the updated system operates correctly. A formal, mathematical model of dynamic update should be developed, in order to understand by both users and implementors of update technology what design choices can be considered. In this paper, we define a formal calculus $update\pi$, a variant extension of higher-order $\pi$ calculus, to model dynamic updates of component-based software, which is language and technology independent. The calculus focuses on following main concepts: proper granularity of update, timing of dynamic update, state transformation between versions, update failure check and recovery. We describe a series of rule on safe component updates to model some general processes of dynamic update and discuss its reduction semantics coincides with a labelled transition system semantics that illustrate the expressive power of these calculi.