A Multilevel Contract Model for Dependable Feature-Oriented Components

Feature-Oriented System Development is a promising and recent approach for developing domain-specific component-based systems. To be adopted in a safety-critical environment it must handle dependability requirements and offer mechanisms to ensure the reliability level of the components and the system. For this purpose, the contract-based approach is a lightweight formal method for designing and specifying systems' requirements, it can be introduced in an early stage during the design phase. In this paper, we present a multilevel contract model and a domain-specific modeling language that aims to address reliability and quality issues for component-based systems by expressing and specifying a set of its properties and constraints.