Toward Supporting Unplanned Dynamic Changes of Service-Based Business Processes

Abstract

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has become an application development paradigm widely recognized both in academia and in industry. Although SOA-based applications may vertically implement business processes through the composition of loosely coupled services, they have to face frequent changes, such as unavailability of service (due to the uncontrollable, dynamic, and distributed environments) or dynamic replacement of service (due to specific user requirements). This indicates that the service compositions are expected to be adaptable enough to cater to such changing situations. In this paper, we propose an approach to supporting unplanned dynamic changes of service compositions by combining variability management and dynamic binding. The proposed approach introduces the concept of abstract proxy services in a variability-supporting service composition language, namely VxBPEL, and provides a mechanism to support variation design and dynamic binding for unplanned changes at run time. To realize the proposed approach, we have developed a service composition engine that supports abstract proxy services and their run-time replacement via service discovery or user intervention. Finally, a case study has been conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach and quantify the performance overhead resulting from runtime variability management and dynamic binding. The experimental results show that the proposed approach overcomes the limitation of imperative variability-based approaches in handling unplanned dynamic changes and further enhances the dynamic adaptability of VxBPEL-based service compositions. INDEX TERMS Service oriented architectures, variability management, dynamic binding, adaptive service composition, business process execution language for Web services.

Dynamic Service Composition Method Based on Zero-Sum Game Integrated Inverse Reinforcement Learning

“…In [14], the authors pointed out that most of the current studies are adaptive methods for service selection module, that is, they only consider the abnormal situation of service composition runtime, but do not consider the service discovery module, that is, the dynamic change of the candidate service set. In [15], the authors introduced the concept of abstract proxy services in a variability-supporting service composition language, namely VxBPEL, and provides a mechanism to support variation design and dynamic binding for unplanned changes at run time. In [16], the authors constructed a QoS Dependency Graph to capture QoS variations, and achieve adaptive composition with dynamic QoS satisfactions.…”