CONNECT · Emergent Connectors for Eternal Software Intensive Networked Systems

The CONNECT Integrated Project aims at enabling continuous composition of networked systems to respond to the evolution of functionalities provided to and required from the networked environment. At present the efficacy of integrating and composing networked systems depends on the level of interoperability of the systems' underlying technologies. However, interoperable middleware cannot cover the ever growing heterogeneity dimensions of the networked environment. CONNECT aims at dropping the interoperability barrier by adopting a revolutionary approach to the seamless networking of digital systems, that is, synthesizing on the fly the connectors via which networked systems communicate. The resulting emergent connectors are effectively synthesized according to the behavioral semantics of application- down to middleware-layer protocols run by the interacting parties. The synthesis process is based on a formal foundation for connectors, which allows learning, reasoning about and adapting the interaction behavior of networked systems at run-time. Synthesized connectors are concrete emergent system entities that are dependable, unobtrusive, and evolvable, while not compromising the quality of software applications. To reach these objectives the CONNECT project undertakes interdisciplinary research in the areas of behavior learning, formal methods, semantic services, software engineering, dependability, and middleware. Specifically, CONNECT will investigate the following issues and related challenges: (i) Modeling and reasoning about peer system functionalities, (ii) Modeling and reasoning about connector behaviors, (iii) Runtime synthesis of connectors, (iv) Learning connector behaviors,(v) Dependability assurance, and (vi) System architecture. The effectiveness of CONNECT research will be assessed by experimenting in the field of wide area, highly heterogeneous systems where today's solutions to interoperability already fall short (e.g., systems of systems of systems).