Managing expectations: Runtime negotiation of information quality requirements in event-based systems

Abstract

Interconnected smart devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) provide fine-granular data about real-world events, leveraged by service-based systems using the paradigm of event-based systems (EBS) for invocation. Depending on the capabilities and state of the system, the information propagated in EBS differs in content but also in properties like precision, rate and freshness. At runtime, consumers have different dynamic requirements about those properties that constitute quality of information (QoI) for them. Current approaches to support quality-related requirements in EBS are either domain-specific or limited in terms of expressiveness, flexibility and scope as they do not allow participants to adapt their behavior. We introduce the generic concept of expectations to express, negotiate and enforce arbitrary requirements about information quality in EBS at runtime. In this paper, we present the model of expectations, capabilities and feedback based on generic properties. Participants express requirements and define individual tradeoffs between them as expectations while system features are expressed as capabilities. We discuss the algorithms to (i) negotiate requirements at runtime in the middleware by matching expectations to capabilities and (ii) adapt participants as well as the middleware. We illustrate the architecture for runtime-support in industry-strength systems by describing prototypes implemented within a centralized and a decentralized EBS.