Toward a Negotiation Framework for Self-Integration

Self-integrating systems dynamically seek out external systems to help meet their local and global goals. To perform the integration, the systems must alter their behavior given their current state and environment, along with their static and situational requirements. Situational requirements express functionality that the system cannot perform independently and may be needed to operate in certain states and environments. Assuming that the integrating systems provide metrics for how well they comply with their requirements, self-integration can introduce new functionality and evidence to support compliance with situational requirements. In domains such as IoT architectures, employing self-integration to build a dynamic network of IoT devices means the system may not have its full functionality as a standalone entity. New negotiation technologies are needed to promote the flexible integration of systems at the task and process levels. In this paper, we examine how runtime assurances of situational requirements can be supported by facilitating self-integration using contract theory. To illustrate the approach, we extend a trust negotiation protocol for IoT devices to create an assume-guarantee contract that includes a set of composable assessment procedures. The contract yields additional assurances for dynamic integration from a shared, historical record of adaptation assessment. We demonstrate the approach with a use case involving rescue drones and wearable (IoT) devices.