Dynamic Synthesis of Mediators in Ubiquitous Environments

Given today's highly dynamic and extremely heterogeneous software systems, automatically achieving interoperability between their software components -- without modifying them--- is more than simply desirable, it is fast becoming a necessity. Although much work has been carried out on interoperability, existing solutions have not fully succeeded in keeping pace with the increasing complexity and heterogeneity of modern software, and meeting the demands of runtime support. These solutions either require developers to implement mediators, which are software entities that reconcile the differences between the implementations of software components so as to enable them to work together, or generate mediators based on declarative specifications of the composition of components or correspondences between the components' interfaces. Due to their dependency on such specifications, existing solutions are insufficient for ubiquitous environments where software components meet dynamically and interactions take place spontaneously. The main contribution of this thesis is to define an approach and provide a supporting tool for the automated synthesis and deployment of mediators in order to enable heterogeneous software components, with compatible functionalities, to interoperate. The synthesised mediators reconcile the differences between the interfaces of the components and coordinate their behaviours from the application down to the middleware layers. In this thesis, we show that ontology reasoning, constraint programming, and automata techniques can provide the basis for a practical and sound solution to automate the synthesis of mediators at both design time and runtime. The full automation of mediator synthesis removes the need for solutions requiring declarative, often detailed, specifications of how to perform mediation. We validate our approach through the development of a tool, MICS, and its experimentation with a number of case studies ranging from heterogeneous chat applications to emergency management in systems of systems. Through these case studies, we demonstrate the viability and efficiency of the automated synthesis of mediators to enable functionally-compatible software components to interoperate seamlessly.

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