Satisfying Requirements for Pervasive Service Compositions

International audiencePervasive environments are characterised by highly heterogeneous services and mobile devices with dynamic availability. Approaches such as that proposed by the Connect project provide means to enable such systems to be discovered and composed, through mediation where necessary. As services appear and disappear, the set of feasible compositions changes. In such a pervasive environment, a designer encounters two related challenges: what goals it is reasonable to pursue in the current context and how to use the services presently available to achieve his goals. This paper proposes an approach to design service compositions, facilitating an interactive process to find the trade-off between the possible and the desirable. Following our approach, the system finds at runtime, where possible, compositions related to the developer's requirements. This process can realise the intent the developer specifies at design time, taking into account the services available at runtime, without a prohibitive level of pre-specification, inappropriate for such dynamic environments

Automated synthesis of mediators to support component interoperability

Interoperability is a major concern for the software engineering field, given the increasing need to compose components dynamically and seamlessly. This dynamic composition is often hampered by differences in the interfaces and behaviours of independently-developed components. To address these differences without changing the components, mediators that systematically enforce interoperability between functionally-compatible components by mapping their interfaces and coordinating their behaviours are required. Existing approaches to mediator synthesis assume that an interface mapping is provided which specifies the correspondence between the operations and data of the components at hand. In this paper, we present an approach based on ontology reasoning and constraint programming in order to infer mappings between components' interfaces automatically. These mappings guarantee semantic compatibility between the operations and data of the interfaces. Then, we analyse the behaviours of components in order to synthesise, if possible, a mediator that coordinates the computed mappings so as to make the components interact properly. Our approach is formally-grounded to ensure the correctness of the synthesised mediator. We demonstrate the validity of our approach by implementing the MICS (Mediator synthesIs to Connect Components) tool and experimenting it with various real-world case studies

Project Final Report Use and Dissemination of Foreground

This document is the final report on use and dissemination of foreground, part of the CONNECT final report. The document provides the lists of: publications, dissemination activities, and exploitable foregroun

Satisfying requirements for pervasive service compositions

Pervasive environments are characterised by highly heterogeneous services and mobile devices with dynamic availability. Approaches such as that proposed by the Connect project provide means to enable such systems to be discovered and composed, through mediation where necessary. As services appear and disappear, the set of feasible compositions changes. In such a pervasive environment, a designer encounters two related challenges: what goals it is reasonable to pursue in the current context and how to use the services presently available to achieve his goals. This paper proposes an approach to design service compositions, facilitating an interactive process to find the trade-o between the possible and the desirable. Following our approach, the system finds at runtime, where possible, compositions related to the developer's requirements. This process can realise the intent the developer specifies at design time, taking into account the services available at runtime, without a prohibitive level of pre-specification, inappropriate for such dynamic environments