Towards process-based composition of self-managing service-oriented systems

Abstract

Loose coupling and preserving safe changes are two key criteria for composing self-managing services. Composition of adaptive control components with business services without interfering with the original service operations is complicated by the dynamic and highly distributed nature of service-oriented systems. Essentially, encapsulating control logic into abstract logical models enables a clear separation of concerns, with states and transitions indicating the logical control flow. The challenge is to seamlessly integrate these models with services and their host infrastructure as a unified self-managing environment. In this paper, we present an architectural solution towards process-based composition and coordination of self-managing services. This architecture framework leverages business process models to produce declarative and executable control models. We discuss the problem context and outline the research challenges of such an approach.

On Self-Adaptive Process-Based Dependable Web Service Composition

“…Verma and Sheth [19] have applied business process models to support autonomic web processes. Business process modeling (BPM) tools have been increasingly used to coordinate business process flows, as opposed to hard-coded application logic [16]. Charfi and Mezini [3] use an aspect-based container to provide middleware support for BPEL.…”

“…Adaptability [5,7] is a key characteristic to deal with the complexities of some modern software intensive systems. Adaptive component designs where component connections are not hard coded, but are established dynamically by their logical or functional roles [16], are more flexible and faulty components are easier to replace. A selfadaptive software system is able to modify its structure and/or behaviour at run-time due to changes in the system or its requirements or deployed environment.…”

Composing Adaptive Web Services on COTS Middleware

“…This task includes the mapping of the elements and associations in Fig 1 to the middleware components and communication mechanisms respectively. In our previous work, we have applied this architecture to develop several different adaptive applications on various popular open-source middleware platforms [7,11,17]. The common characteristics shared by these middlewares is that the architecture supports a pipeline of interceptors or handlers to methods of the target class instance.…”

“…As most middleware provides similar mechanics (such as interceptors and handlers) for extending their core functionalities to help custom and advanced development, the architecture is easy to be adopted for different platforms. Although we only demonstrate the usage on .Net WCF due to the space limitation, we have already validated this architecture on other Java Web service applications [4,7,11,17].…”