Steps on the Road to Component Evolvability

We have recently developed a calculus for dynamically evolvable aggregations of components. The calculus extends CCS with primitives for describing components and their evolvability capabilities. Central to these novel primitives is a restricted form of higher-order communication of processes involved in update operations. The origins of our calculus for components can indeed be traced back to our own previous work on expressiveness and decidability results for core higher-order process calculi. Here we overview these previous works, and discuss the motivations and design decisions that led us from higher-order process calculi to calculi for component evolvability.