Exploiting Self-Descriptions for Checking Interoperations between Embedded Components

Today’s embedded systems like cars, robots and industrial plants are more and more built from a large number of independent networked devices provided by third party suppliers and are configured to a complete system after the software of the individual components has been designed and implemented. The components are assumed to have a their own computational core, some periphery like sensors or actuators, and a network interface. They cooperate with other components via messages. To an extreme, a complete vehicle as a car or a robot can be viewed as a component communicating and cooperating with other mobile systems or an instrumented smart environment sharing information and services. There are multiple dimensions and system levels of interoperability like syntactic, semantic and temporal, which have to be considered when performing the final configuration towards an operational system or even support dynamic interactions.