Web of Lossy Adapters for Interface Interoperability: An Algorithm and NP-Completeness of Minimization

Different services that provide similar functionality will often be accessed using widely different interfaces, especially if standardization is lacking. To avoid having to rewrite separate code for all interfaces that may have to be used, interface adapters can be used to translate calls to one interface into calls to another interface. These interface adapters may not be able to achieve perfect adaptation. It becomes harder to analyze the adaptation loss when combining such interface adapters in order to reduce the number of adapters that must be developed. The previous work has defined a rigorous mathematical basis for analyzing the loss in single interface adapter chains.