Black-Box Composition: a Dynamic Approach

A core issue in component-based software engineering is represented by automatic component adaptation and composition. At behavioural level, an adaptor is an appropriate environment for two or more software components to correctly interoperate with respect to a certain desired behavioural property. This, however, requires for the behavioural interfaces of all components to be well-specified, which is not always the case in industrial practice. What happens if these components are black-boxes: incomplete specification, no provided models and no source code to extract interfaces from? How could we integrate them? Our approach interleaves online monitoring, verification-driven execution and model refinement in order to infer models of the black-box components, provide early access to a part of the system functionality whenever possible and synthesize permissive adaptors. We present both a centralized and a distributed technique, the last one directed towards the exploration and control of remote components.