TY - GEN

T1 - Holons

T2 - Towards a systematic approach to composing systems of systems

AU - Blair, Gordon Shaw

AU - Bromberg, Yérom-David

AU - Coulson, Geoffrey

AU - El Khatib, Yehia

AU - Réveillère, Laurent

AU - B. Ribeiro, Heverson

AU - Rivière, Etienne

AU - Taïani, François Georges Denis

N1 - © ACM, 2015. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in ARM 2015 Proceedings of the 14th International Workshop on Adaptive and Reflective Middleware http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2834965.2834970

PY - 2015/12/7

Y1 - 2015/12/7

N2 - The world's computing infrastructure is increasingly differentiating into self-contained distributed systems with various purposes and capabilities (e.g. IoT installations, clouds, VANETs, WSNs, CDNs, ...). Furthermore, such systems are increasingly being composed to generate systems of systems that offer value-added functionality. Today, however, system of systems composition is typically ad-hoc and fragile. It requires developers to possess an intimate knowledge of system internals and low-level interactions between their components. In this paper, we outline a vision and set up a research agenda towards the generalised programmatic construction of distributed systems as compositions of other distributed systems. Our vision, in which we refer uniformly to systems and to compositions of systems as holons, employs code generation techniques and uses common abstractions, operations and mechanisms at all system levels to support uniform system of systems composition. We believe our holon approach could facilitate a step change in the convenience and correctness with which systems of systems can be built, and open unprecedented opportunities for the emergence of new and previously-unenvisaged distributed system deployments, analogous perhaps to the impact the mashup culture has had on the way we now build web applications.

AB - The world's computing infrastructure is increasingly differentiating into self-contained distributed systems with various purposes and capabilities (e.g. IoT installations, clouds, VANETs, WSNs, CDNs, ...). Furthermore, such systems are increasingly being composed to generate systems of systems that offer value-added functionality. Today, however, system of systems composition is typically ad-hoc and fragile. It requires developers to possess an intimate knowledge of system internals and low-level interactions between their components. In this paper, we outline a vision and set up a research agenda towards the generalised programmatic construction of distributed systems as compositions of other distributed systems. Our vision, in which we refer uniformly to systems and to compositions of systems as holons, employs code generation techniques and uses common abstractions, operations and mechanisms at all system levels to support uniform system of systems composition. We believe our holon approach could facilitate a step change in the convenience and correctness with which systems of systems can be built, and open unprecedented opportunities for the emergence of new and previously-unenvisaged distributed system deployments, analogous perhaps to the impact the mashup culture has had on the way we now build web applications.

KW - systems of systems

KW - Internet of Things

KW - Internet of Things (IoT)

KW - middleware

KW - distributed systems

KW - distributed computing

U2 - 10.1145/2834965.2834970

DO - 10.1145/2834965.2834970

M3 - Conference contribution/Paper

SN - 9781450337335

SP - 5:1

BT - ARM 2015 Proceedings of the 14th International Workshop on Adaptive and Reflective Middleware

PB - ACM

CY - New York

ER -