Turning compositionality into composability

Abstract

Compositional theories and technologies facilitate the decomposition of a complex system into components, as well as their integration via interfaces. Component interfaces hide the internal details of the components, thereby reducing integration complexity. A system is said to be composable if the properties established and validated for components in isolation hold once the components are integrated to form the system. This brings us the question: "Is compositionality related to composability?" This paper answers this question in the affirmative; it considers a previously known interface for compositionality and shows that it can be used for composability. It also presents a run-time policing mechanism for this interface.