1 Background

As members of the Reusable Software Research Group (RSRG) at The Ohio State University, we have been exploring various aspects of software component engineering for over ten years. One recent focus of our research has been on the identification, formalization, and expression of dependency and behavioral relationships between software components in particular, and analogous components of arbitrary systems in general. Our ideas about component relationships are based on the results of RSRG research which have been incorporated into the RESOLVE framework, language, and discipline for software component engineering [SW94].

To demonstrate the application of these ideas for software component relationships, we have developed the RESOLVE/Ada, RESOLVE/C++, and RESOLVE/Ada95 disciplines for software component engineering. These disciplines use the language mechanisms of C++ and Ada to encode language-independent software component relationships. But as suggested above, we also are interested in exploring the relationships between software systems and other engineered systems, especially in terms of the mathematical modeling techniques that support good design. This interest is one of the motivating forces behind the work outlined here.