Supporting reuse and configuration: A port based SCM model

In this paper a Software Configuration Model (SCM) that has been specifically developed to consistently support reuse of software components and configuration of systems. In designing the model we explicitely wanted to address the following issues: - supporting modular software development and facilitating its modifiability; - supporting reusability of components and definition of reuse techniques; - supporting definition of sets of equivalent (with respect to a crtain property) components (variant/version control); - supporting configuration of stable parts of a system; The approach wa have taken follows the experience we gained in supporting configuration management on a (logic-deductive) data base. That is, we define a schema for a kernel configuration environment data base (i.e. the objects, their relationships and the static constraints), and a set of operations wich represent the dynamic component of the data model and among wich configuration tools are defined.