Structured Handling of Online Interface Upgrades in Integrating Dependable Systems of Systems

摘要

The integration of complex systems out of existing systems is an active area of research and development. There are many practical situations in which the interfaces of the component systems, for example belonging to separate organisations, are changed dynamically and without notification. Usually systems of system (SoS) developers deal with such situations off-line causing considerable downtime and undermining the quality of the service that SoSs are delivering [Romanovsky & Smith 2002]. In this paper we propose an approach to on-line handling such upgrades in a structured and disciplined fashion. All interface changes are viewed as abnormal events and general fault tolerance mechanisms (exception handling, in particular) are applied to dealing with them. The paper outlines general ways of detecting such interface upgrades and recovering after them. An Internet Travel Agency is used as a case study throughout the paper. An implementation demonstrating how the general approach proposed can be applied for dealing with some of the possible interface upgrades within this case study is discussed.