@Article{Allen97TOSEM,
      AUTHOR = {Allen, Robert and Garlan, David},
      TITLE = {A Formal Basis for Architectural Connection},
      YEAR = {1997},
      MONTH = {July},
      JOURNAL = {ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology},
      KEY = {Allen},
      VOLUME = {6},
      NUMBER = {3},
      PAGES = {213-249},
      PDF = {http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/able/ftp/wright-tosem97-revision/wright-tosem97-revision.pdf},
      PS = {http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/able/ftp/wright-tosem97-revision/wright-tosem97-revision.ps},
      ABSTRACT = {As software systems become more complex the overall system structure -- or software architecture -- becomes a central design problem. An important step towards an engineering discipline of software is a formal basis for describing and analyzing these designs. In this paper we present a formal approach to one aspect of architectural design: the interactions between components. The key idea is to define architectural connectors as explicit semantic entities. These are specified as a collection of protocols that characterize each of the participant roles in an interaction and how these roles interact. We illustrate how this scheme can be used to define a variety of common architectural connectors. We further provide a formal semantics and show how this leads to a system in which architectural compatibility can be checked in a way analogous to type checking in programming languages. },
      KEYWORDS = {Formal Methods, Model Checking, Software Architecture}
}