Behaviour, Interaction and Dynamics

The growth and diffusion of reconfigurable and adaptive systems motivate the foundational study of models of software connectors that can evolve dynamically, as opposed to the better understood notion of static connectors. In this paper we investigate the interplay of behaviour, interaction and dynamics in the context of the BIP component framework, here denoted BI(P), as we disregard priorities. We introduce two extensions of BIP: 1) reconfigurable BI(P) allows to reconfigure the set of admissible interactions, while preserving the set of interacting components; 2) dynamic BI(P) allows to spawn new components and interactions during execution. Our main technical results show that reconfigurable BI(P) is as expressive as BI(P), while dynamic BI(P) allows to deal with infinite state systems. Still, we show that reachability remains decidable for dynamic BI(P).