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Application-Layer Connector Synthesis

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Formal Methods for Eternal Networked Software Systems (SFM 2011)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 6659))

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Abstract

The heterogeneity characterizing the systems populating the Ubiquitous Computing environment prevents their seamless interoperability. Heterogeneous protocols may be willing to cooperate in order to reach some common goal even though they meet dynamically and do not have a priori knowledge of each other. Despite numerous efforts have been done in the literature, the automated and run-time interoperability is still an open challenge for such environment. We consider interoperability as the ability for two Networked Systems (NSs) to communicate and correctly coordinate to achieve their goal(s).

In this chapter we report the main outcomes of our past and recent research on automatically achieving protocol interoperability via connector synthesis. We consider application-layer connectors by referring to two conceptually distinct notions of connector: coordinator and mediator. The former is used when the NSs to be connected are already able to communicate but they need to be specifically coordinated in order to reach their goal(s). The latter goes a step forward representing a solution for both achieving correct coordination and enabling communication between highly heterogeneous NSs. In the past, most of the works in the literature described efforts to the automatic synthesis of coordinators while, in recent years the focus moved also to the automatic synthesis of mediators. Within the Connect project, by considering our past experience on automatic coordinator synthesis as a baseline, we propose a formal theory of mediators and a related method for automatically eliciting a way for the protocols to interoperate. The solution we propose is the automated synthesis of emerging mediating connectors (i.e., mediators for short).

This work has been partially supported by the FET project Connect No 231167.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Informatica, Università degli Studi dell’Aquila, Italy

    Paola Inverardi, Romina Spalazzese & Massimo Tivoli

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  1. Paola Inverardi
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  2. Romina Spalazzese
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  3. Massimo Tivoli
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  1. Dipartimento di Scienze di Base e Fondamenti, Università di Urbino “Carlo Bo”, Piazza della Repubblica 13, 61029, Urbino, Italy

    Marco Bernardo

  2. INRIA Paris-Rocquencourt, France

    Valérie Issarny

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Inverardi, P., Spalazzese, R., Tivoli, M. (2011). Application-Layer Connector Synthesis. In: Bernardo, M., Issarny, V. (eds) Formal Methods for Eternal Networked Software Systems. SFM 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6659. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21455-4_5

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