Automated Integration of Service-Oriented Software Systems

Abstract

Abstract. In the near future we will be surrounded by a virtually infinite number of software applications that provide services in the digital space. This situation radically changes the way software will be produced and used: (i) software is increasingly produced according to specific goals and by integrating existing software; (ii) the focus of software production will be shifted towards reuse of third-parties software, typically blackbox, that is often provided without a machine readable documentation. The evidence underlying this scenario is that the price to pay for this software availability is a lack of knowledge on the software itself, notably on its interaction behaviour. A producer will operate with software artefacts that are not completely known in terms of their functional and non-functional characteristics. The general problem is therefore directed to the ability of interacting with the artefacts to the extent the goal is reached. This is not a trivial problem given the virtually infinite interaction protocols that can be defined at application level. Different software artefacts with heterogeneous interaction protocols may need to interoperate in order to reach the goal. In this paper we focus on techniques and tools for integration code synthesis, which are able to deal with partial knowledge and automatically produce correct-by-construction serviceoriented systems with respect to functional goals. The research approach we propose builds around two phases: elicit and integrate. The first concerns observation theories and techniques to elicit functional behavioural models of the interaction protocol of black-box services. The second deals with compositional theories and techniques to automatically synthesize appropriate integration means to compose the services together in order to realize a service choreography that satisfies the goal.

ActivFORMS: A Formally-Founded Model-Based Approach to Engineer Self-Adaptive Systems

“…Facets of the method providing assurance for adaptive systems Model-based development of dynamically adaptive software [Zhang and Cheng 2006] -Language: Petri Nets to specify the adaptive system and LTL for the required properties -Properties: local and global invariants expressed as liveness and safety properties that should be satised by adaptive programs -Guarantees: correctness of an adaptive program by model checking Petri Net model against the properties; model-based testing to ensure conformance between the model and the code Automated Integration of Service-Oriented Software Systems [Autili et al 2015] -Language: Labeled Transition System (LTS) to model a choreography of services and concrete instances -Properties: LTS models define the choreography and the required behavior of the services -Guarantees: Correct-by-construction of service choreography w.r.t the required behavior of the services using simulation Robustness-Driven Resilience Evaluation of Self-Adaptive Software Systems [Cámara et al 2017] -Language: Discrete Time Markov Chain models to specify controller failure conditions and Probabilistic Computation Tree Logic (PCTL) for required properties -Properties: resilience requirements expressed as probabilistic properties that quantify the failure and recovery time of a controller -Guarantees: probability of satisfaction of resilience requirements when the target system is subject to controller failures using probabilistic model checking Runtime approaches. [Calinescu et al 2011] uses a probabilistic model of an adaptive system and applies runtime quantitative verification (RQV) to identify and enforce optimal system configurations under changing conditions.…”

“…Conformance between the models and programs is guaranteed using model-based testing. [Autili et al 2015] deals with partial knowledge by automatically producing service-oriented systems in two phases. The first phase (elicit) applies a technique called StrawBerry that takes service descriptions to derive behaviour automata of the service interactions.…”