Achieving functional and non functional interoperability through synthesized connectors

Our everyday life is pervaded by the use of a number of heterogeneous systems that are continuously and dynamically available in the networked environment to interoperate to achieve some goal. Goals may include both functional and non functional aspects and the evolving nature of such environment requires automated solutions as means to reach the needed level of flexibility. Achieving interoperability in such environment is a challenging problem. Even though some of such systems may in principle interact since they have compatible functionalities and similar interaction protocols, mismatches in their protocols and non functional issues arising from the environment may undermine their seamless interoperability. In this paper, we propose an approach for the automated synthesis of application layer connectors between heterogeneous networked systems (NSs) addressing both functional and some non functional interoperability. Our contributions are: (i) an automated connectors synthesis approach for NSs interoperability taking into account functional, performance and dependability aspects spanning pre-deployment time and run-time; (ii) a connector adaptation process, related to the performance and dependability aspects; and (iii) a stochastic model-based implementation of the performance and dependability analysis. In addition, we implemented, analyzed, and critically discussed a case study.