Efficiently Composing Validated Systems Integration Gateways for Dynamic, Diverse Data

Abstract

Software systems typically evolve independently from one another. Integration opportunities and benefits only become apparent when new users or organizations adopt the system into the composition of a new system of systems solution, typically when new use cases are identified, or tangential needs arise. This leads to systems designed to use different data formats, network protocols, interaction patterns, and other disparities unable to natively communicate with each other. When integration does occur, it is often with custom one-off solutions that bridge the networks and systems in question. While integration may be plausible and even successful, these solutions tend to be costly, slow to produce, and tightly coupled to the specific systems or, even worse, specific versions of systems that they are connecting. In this paper we examine ROGER, a composable and dynamic gateway building framework that helps to address these integration costs and complexities. The ROGER framework abstracts away the common infrastructure needed in any system-bridging middleware, fosters reuse and capability sharing through a composition-driven plug-in framework, and allows for rapid gateway construction through a policy-centric composition structure. ROGER seeks to shorten integration gateway development time, reduce the amount of code creation required to build and deploy new gateways, as well as enable in-mission adaptation and extension of gateway capabilities as mission parameters and system awareness dictates. At the heart of this dynamism and adaptability in ROGER is the Information Flow Policy (IFP), a domain specific language that describes processing pipelines over incoming data streams. This paper presents the design of the compositional model and of the IFP that describes and enables the composition. We use a set of ROGER gateways as a dataset, along with a representative case study, in initial evaluations that show promising results regarding ROGER's ability to reduce development time and cost as well as minimize required skill sets.