A Model Based Framework for Service Availability Management

High availability of services is an important requirement in several domains, including mission critical systems. The Service Availability Forum (SA Forum) is a consortium of telecommunications and computing companies that defines standard middleware solutions for high availability. Availability Management Framework (AMF) manages the high availability of services by coordinating their application components according to redundancy models. To protect these services, AMF requires a configuration, i.e. a representation of the organization of the logical entities composing an application under its control. AMF configuration design is error-prone and tedious if done manually, due to the complexity of the AMF domain. This PhD thesis explores the effective design and analysis of AMF configurations, proposing a model-based management framework that facilitates this process. We propose a domain-specific modeling language that captures AMF domain concepts, relationships, and constraints, facilitating the management of AMF configurations. We define this language by extending UML through its profiling mechanism, capturing the concepts of AMF configurations and the description of the software for which the configuration will be generated. We introduce a new approach for the automatic generation of AMF configurations based on our UML profile using model transformation techniques. This approach consists of a set of transformations from the software description entities into AMF configurations while satisfying the requirements of the services to be provided as well as the constraints of the deployment infrastructure. We also propose a third-party AMF configuration validation approach consisting of syntactical and semantic validations. Syntactical validation checks the well-formedness of third-party configurations by validating them against AMF standard specification requirements captured in our UML profile. Semantic validation focuses on ensuring the runtime protection of services at configuration time (the SI-Protection problem). SI-Protection has combinatorial aspects and results in an NP-hard problem for most redundancy models, which we have tackled by devising a heuristic-based method, overcoming its complexity. We present proofs of concepts by using different available technologies: IBM Rational Software Architect (RSA) for implementing our UML profiles, Eclipse environment for developing a prototype tool for validating third-party configurations, and Atlas Transformation Language (ATL) for developing a prototype implementation of our model-based configuration generation approach

An automation approach based on workflows and software agents for Industrial Product-Service Systems

Industrial Product-Service Systems (IPS2) fulfil specific customer needs. This often implies the flexible reaction to changing requirements, impacting the adaption effort for the IPS2 provider. Additionally the modelling of individual business processes for the IPS2 delivery imposes a challenge to the provider. A great variety of process types, ranging from production to maintenance process, has to be covered in order to ensure a smooth and economically feasible IPS2 operation. Therefore, an approach for the modelling and automation of IPS2 delivery processes is of specific interest. In this paper an IPS2 automation approach will be presented that allows the modelling and deployment of the specific business processes and enables the integration of service shares into the automation solution of the product share. The presented approach allows for an easy adaption of the product share configuration. To achieve this goal, a workflow management system represents the backbone of all customer provider relationships that distributes the tasks and responsibilities to the IPS2 network partners according to the IPS2 business model. For machine-oriented service shares the workflow management system interacts with an implemented Java-based software agent system by means of web services. Lastly, an application example of a prototypical IPS2 in the micro production domain will be given. The control system architecture and its implementation will be described and the application use case of manufacturing in the area of micro milling machine tools as a service share will be presented. An outlook of further work and future potential will complete the paper

Reliability model for component-based systems in cosmic (a case study)

Software component technology has a substantial impact on modern IT evolution. The benefits of this technology, such as reusability, complexity management, time and effort reduction, and increased productivity, have been key drivers of its adoption by industry. One of the main issues in building component-based systems is the reliability of the composed functionality of the assembled components. This paper proposes a reliability assessment model based on the architectural configuration of a component-based system and the reliability of the individual components, which is usage- or testing-independent. The goal of this research is to improve the reliability assessment process for large software component-based systems over time, and to compare alternative component-based system design solutions prior to implementation. The novelty of the proposed reliability assessment model lies in the evaluation of the component reliability from its behavior specifications, and of the system reliability from its topology; the reliability assessment is performed in the context of the implementation-independent ISO/IEC 19761:2003 International Standard on the COSMIC method chosen to provide the component\u27s behavior specifications. In essence, each component of the system is modeled by a discrete time Markov chain behavior based on its behavior specifications with extended-state machines. Then, a probabilistic analysis by means of Markov chains is performed to analyze any uncertainty in the component\u27s behavior. Our hypothesis states that the less uncertainty there is in the component\u27s behavior, the greater the reliability of the component. The system reliability assessment is derived from a typical component-based system architecture with composite reliability structures, which may include the composition of the serial reliability structures, the parallel reliability structures and the p-out-of-n reliability structures. The approach of assessing component-based system reliability in the COSMIC context is illustrated with the railroad crossing case study. © 2008 World Scientific Publishing Company

The P3 platform: an approach and software system for developing diagrammatic model-based methods in design research

Many issues in design and design management have been explored by building models which capture the relationships between different aspects of the problem at hand. These models require computer support to construct and analyse. However, appropriate modelling tools can be time-consuming to develop in a research environment. Reflecting upon five design research projects, this paper proposes that such projects can be facilitated by recognising the iterative and tightly-coupled nature of research and tool development, and by attempting to minimise the effort of solution prototyping within this process. Our approach is enabled by a software platform which can be rapidly configured to implement many conceivable modelling approaches. This configurability is complemented by an emerging library of modelling and analysis approaches tailored to explore design process systems. The platform-based approach enables any mix of modelling concepts to be easily created. We propose it could thus help researchers to explore a wide range of questions without being constrained to existing conventions for modelling – or for model integration

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

Component-aware Orchestration of Cloud-based Enterprise Applications, from TOSCA to Docker and Kubernetes

Enterprise IT is currently facing the challenge of coordinating the management of complex, multi-component applications across heterogeneous cloud platforms. Containers and container orchestrators provide a valuable solution to deploy multi-component applications over cloud platforms, by coupling the lifecycle of each application component to that of its hosting container. We hereby propose a solution for going beyond such a coupling, based on the OASIS standard TOSCA and on Docker. We indeed propose a novel approach for deploying multi-component applications on top of existing container orchestrators, which allows to manage each component independently from the container used to run it. We also present prototype tools implementing our approach, and we show how we effectively exploited them to carry out a concrete case study

Dynamic Model-based Management of Service-Oriented Infrastructure.

Models are an effective tool for systems and software design. They allow software architects to abstract from the non-relevant details. Those qualities are also useful for the technical management of networks, systems and software, such as those that compose service oriented architectures. Models can provide a set of well-defined abstractions over the distributed heterogeneous service infrastructure that enable its automated management. We propose to use the managed system as a source of dynamically generated runtime models, and decompose management processes into a composition of model transformations. We have created an autonomic service deployment and configuration architecture that obtains, analyzes, and transforms system models to apply the required actions, while being oblivious to the low-level details. An instrumentation layer automatically builds these models and interprets the planned management actions to the system. We illustrate these concepts with a distributed service update operation

Composition and Self-Adaptation of Service-Based Systems with Feature Models

The adoption of mechanisms for reusing software in pervasive systems has not yet become standard practice. This is because the use of pre-existing software requires the selection, composition and adaptation of prefabricated software parts, as well as the management of some complex problems such as guaranteeing high levels of efficiency and safety in critical domains. In addition to the wide variety of services, pervasive systems are composed of many networked heterogeneous devices with embedded software. In this work, we promote the safe reuse of services in service-based systems using two complementary technologies, Service-Oriented Architecture and Software Product Lines. In order to do this, we extend both the service discovery and composition processes defined in the DAMASCo framework, which currently does not deal with the service variability that constitutes pervasive systems. We use feature models to represent the variability and to self-adapt the services during the composition in a safe way taking context changes into consideration. We illustrate our proposal with a case study related to the driving domain of an Intelligent Transportation System, handling the context information of the environment.Work partially supported by the projects TIN2008-05932, TIN2008-01942, TIN2012-35669, TIN2012-34840 and CSD2007-0004 funded by Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and FEDER; P09-TIC-05231 and P11-TIC-7659 funded by Andalusian Government; and FP7-317731 funded by EU. Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec