The ubiquitous computing vision is hampered by the often extreme level of heterogeneity in the underlying infrastructure, which in turns impacts on the ability to seamlessly interoperate. Further, the fast pace at which technology evolves at all abstraction layers increasingly challenges the lifetime of networked systems in the digital environment. Overcoming the interoperability challenge in ubiquitous computing systems is at the heart of the FP7 IST FET CONNECT project, which aims at dropping the interoperability barrier by adopting a revolutionary approach to the seamless networking of systems, that is, synthesizing on the fly the CONNECTors via which networked systems communicate.
In this talk, I will discuss the research challenges faced by CONNECT in order to enable on the fly CONNECTor synthesis. The proposed synthesis process shall in particular lie on appropriate formal foundation for CONNECTors so as to allow learning, reasoning about and adapting the interaction behavior of networked systems at run-time. I will further concentrate on the specific challenges raised for verification & validation, so as to ensure that synthesized CONNECTors meet the requirements of networked systems that get connected.
(*) The work is done as part of collaboration with colleagues of CNR-ISTI (Antonia Bertolino, Felicita Di Giandomenico, Antonino Sabetta) and University of L'Aquila (Paola Inverardi, Romina Spalazzese) in the context of the CONNECT project (http://connect-forever.eu/index.html).

Autonomous systems are increasingly conceived as a means to allow operation in changeable or poorly understood environments. However, granting a system autonomy over its operation removes the ability of the developer to be completely sure of the system’s behaviour under all operating contexts. This combination of environmental and behavioural uncertainty makes the achievement of assurance through testing very problematic. This paper focuses on a class of system, called an m-DAS, that uses run-time models to drive run-time adaptations in changing environmental conditions. We propose a testing approach which is itself model-driven, using model analysis to significantly reduce the set of test cases needed to test for emergent behaviour. Limited testing resources may therefore be prioritised for the most likely scenarios in which emergent behaviour may be observed.

Adaptable reactive software systems continuously interact with their environment responding to external stimuli and triggering events that may be perceived by their users. Designing and maintaining such systems is a challenging task. A key issue to be faced concerns the assessment of their effectiveness, in terms of the ability to meet their required Quality of Service. This paper introduces an approach to support this assessment, with a focus on performance and dependability attributes. Our approach takes advantage from an existing intermediate modeling language and introduces the necessary extensions to cope with reactive software systems. The presented model driven framework exploits the idea of defining a model transformation chain that maps a “design oriented” model of the system to an “analysis oriented” model that lends itself to the application of a suitable analysis methodology. We identify some key concepts that should be present in the design model of an adaptable reactive system, and show how to devise a transformation from such a model to a target analysis models.

Many embedded and distributed applications are based on processing nodes that perform concurrent processing tasks. Unfortunately, it is difficult to evaluate the overall behaviour of this kind of applications because the overall behaviour consists of 1) the execution-paths of asynchronous processing nodes and of 2) synchronization messages that either activate or deactivate processing nodes to perform concurrent processing tasks. In order to facilitate dynamic behaviour and reliability evaluation of applications doing concurrent processing, we developed a method that: 1) is capable of composing an overall presentation for concurrent behaviours and recognizing both the defined use cases and undetermined behaviours from this presentation and 2) supports calculation of use case-specific reliability values for components. In this paper, we describe the method, present a ComponentBee tool that implements the method and supports dynamic behaviour and reliability evaluation of multithreaded Java applications, and finally demonstrate the use of the method with a case study.

Future software systems will be dynamic service oriented systems. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) provides an extensible and dynamic architecture to be used, for example, in smart environments. In such an environment, software has to adapt its behaviour dynamically. Thus, there is a need for Verifying and Validating (V&V) the adaptations at run-time. This paper contributes to that by introducing a novel visualization tool to be used with V&V techniques to aid the software analysts in the verification process of dynamic software systems. When Quality of Service (QoS) of dynamic software systems varies due to the changing environment the Quality Visualization (QVis) tool detects these changes and provides analysts an easier way of understanding the changed behaviour of the system