Service-oriented system engineering

Service-Oriented System Engineering (SOSE) is one of the emerging research areas that involves a number of research challenges in engineering service-oriented systems, the architecture and computing paradigm as well as the development and management of service-oriented systems. Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) exploits services as the fundamental elements for developing computer-based systems. It has been applied to various areas and promotes fundamental changes to system architecture, especially changing the way software systems are being analyzed, architected, designed, implemented, tested, evaluated, delivered, consumed, maintained and evolved. The innovations of SOC also offer many interesting avenues of research for scientific and industrial communities. In this paper, we present the concepts of the SOSE from the related work. The motivation, opportunities and challenges of the SOSE is highlighted thereafter. In addition to this, a brief overview of accepted papers in our Special Issue on SOSE is presented. Finally we highlight and summarize this paper.N/

Aligning a Service Provisioning Model of a Service-Oriented System with the ITIL v.3 Life Cycle

Bringing together the ICT and the business layer of a service-oriented system (SoS) remains a great challenge. Few papers tackle the management of SoS from the business and organizational point of view. One solution is to use the well-known ITIL v.3 framework. The latter enables to transform the organization into a service-oriented organizational which focuses on the value provided to the service customers. In this paper, we align the steps of the service provisioning model with the ITIL v.3 processes. The alignment proposed should help organizations and IT teams to integrate their ICT layer, represented by the SoS, and their business layer, represented by ITIL v.3. One main advantage of this combined use of ITIL and a SoS is the full service orientation of the company.Comment: This document is the technical work of a conference paper submitted to the International Conference on Exploring Service Science 1.5 (IESS 2015

Cloud Computing with Intelligent Agents to Support Service Oriented System Control and Management

the past few years, Cloud computing has becoming one of the revolutionary technologies in ICT which grows in both popularity and importance, both in industry and in academic domain. More and more private companies, government organizations and institutions are convinced and happy to promote Cloud to improve both connectivity and instant social ability. For IT services and solutions for business, Cloud-based platform promises to offer better business intelligence and productive experience by using unified communications, consistent collaborated data and service management. It is well believed that Cloud Computing will also bring a revolution in the healthcare IT sector along with other ICT business. To exploit Cloud computing productivity potential, this paper focuses on adopting Cloud computing technologies with agent-based solutions to support service oriented system control and management. The on-going research and practice demonstrates an application to the management of community care provision, which shows transforming to Software-as-a-Service (Saas) with the combination of a private healthcare cloud and integrated agents can improve business efficiency by providing flexible services scheduling, smarter health care services control and management

A Cost-Benefit-Based Analytical Model for Finding the Optimal Offering of Software Services

In this paper, we introduce an analytical model for maximizingsocial welfare, which can be used for finding the optimal offeringof a set of software services. The analytical model also explainsthe impact of service flexibility on customer’s selection ofbusiness services and on the revenue of service providers. Theanalytical model is based on a utility model and a cost model. Thecost model uses the number of lines of code as the basic measurefor cost and applies linear and polynomial cost functions. Theutility model is derived from a customer-provider relationshipmodel, which relates the user’s utility to the functionality ofbusiness services. The result of the analytical model shows thatthe distribution of functions of an existing business service to alarge number of new business services does not generate anyadditional revenues for the service provider from existingcustomers. Instead, additional revenue is generated through theoffering of business services with fewer functions at lower price.This business services attract customers, which could not affordthe original software service of the provider. The result of theanalytical model also shows that there is an optimal number ofbusiness services that maximizes the net utility of customers

A Client-Aware Reputation System for e-Services

In the Internet age, people are becoming more an more familiar in experiencing online services. Given the intrinsic distributed nature of the electronic transactions involved, there is the need to prove somehow the trustworthiness of such services for supporting a user in her choice. To this aim, different techniques have been presented. For example, a simple but useful solution is to rely on feedback of past users testifying if they have been satisfied by a service. In this paper, we consider a scenario for business transactions where a reputation management system helps clients in choosing services that best satisfy their attitudes and preferences. Specifically, a reputation value is associated to each service at stake. This value is updated according to past and new clients interactions. In fact, at the end of each interaction with a service, clients provide feedback regarding that service. The main feature of our proposal is the client awareness. This derives from designing and implementing a probabilistic client model based on real behaviours of users when they choose a service and give feedback. This client model has been obtained by collecting and processing real data from ones of the most popular websites for travel advice. We present an evaluation aimed at validating our proposal. In the simulations, we also deal with the issue of false feedback, reported by clients that intentionally aim at subverting the reputation value of a service. The simulations results show that our system is robust up to a certain number of malicious feedback

A Method for Bridging the Gap between Business Process Models and Services

Many proposals in the literature are consensual in making business processes as the starting point of a Service-Oriented system development lifecycle. However, there is no systematic approach that can be easily applied in practice. We argue that an effective SOA approach requires an integrated view of organizational business processes, where services are explicitly related to business models components. Accomplishing these requirements is vital for bridging the gap between business needs and their supporting services. This work proposes a top-down method for service identification and analysis from business process models. Each step of the method implements a set of heuristics that are also specified. The method is presented in detail, and constitutes a systematic guide for service identification and analysis. A case study is conducted to demonstrate the use of the method in practice

MAPPING BPEL PROCESSES TO DIAGNOSTIC MODELS

Web services are loosely-coupled, self-contained, and self-describing software modules that perform a predetermined task. These services can be linked together to develop an appli­ cation that spans multiple organizations. This linking is referred to as a composition of web services. These compositions potentially can help businesses respond more quickly and more cost-effectively to changing market conditions. Compositions can be specified using a high- level workflow process language. A fault or problem is a defect in a software or software component. A system is said to have a failure if the service it delivers to the user deviates from compliance with the system specification for a specified period of time. A problem causes a failure. Failures are often referred to as symptoms of a problem. A problem can occur on one component but a failure is detected on another component. This suggests a need to be able to determine a problem based on failures. This is referred to as fault diagnosis. This thesis focuses on the design, implementation and evaluation of a diagnostic module that performs automated mapping of a high-level specification of a web services composition to a diagnostics model. A diagnosis model expresses the relationship between problems and potential symptoms. This mapping can be done by a third party service that is not part of the application resulting from the composition of the web services. Automation will allow a third party to do diagnosis for a large number of compositions and should be less error-prone

Jerrymouse: A Tool for a Flexible and Dynamic Distribution of Web Service Requests

This paper presents a novel architecture for distributing web service requests on clusters of servers. The architecture facilitates a transparent dynamic distribution of requests according to a range of specified policies. This enables a flexible performance in respect of different objectives, services and platforms (typically based on server workload). The architecture has been successfully demonstrated with a prototype implementation (called “Jerrymouse”). Our preliminary results with Jerrymouse indicate stable behaviour and worthwhile performance gains (compared with Apache HTTP Server). A specific policy to deliver reduced cluster electricity savings has also been successfully implemented

Combining caching with a cloud hosted proxy to support mobile consumers of RESTful services

There are numerous problems to be addressed when connecting mobile clients (e.g. smartphones and tablet devices) with Web services. These devices consume Web services via wireless channels; and as a result, developers and researchers are investigating different approaches to address challenges related to network fluctuation, latency, and low bandwidth. In addition, most of these devices have limited capabilities in terms of information processing and resource storage. This research focuses on enabling mobile devices for consuming RESTful Web services efficiently. The aforementioned problems of network instability are addressed in this research by proposing and implementing a cloud centric proxy server architecture; which is based on mirroring resources. The mirroring of the Web server’s resources on the mobile device and the proposed proxy server is achieved by exploring caching techniques. Furthermore, an evaluation is done to determine what kind of components and architecture is required for supporting resource constraint mobile devices like smartphones and tablets while connecting them with RESTful systems. By linking the caching components of the mobile devices with a cloud-hosted proxy server, it becomes possible to share caches and achieve significant performance boost for mobile consumers of the RESTful Web services