Engineering and Adaptation Methodologies (JRA-1)

Motivation

Scientifically founded, consistent and integrated principles, techniques and methodologies for engineering, monitoring and adapting hybrid service based applications (SBAs) and service-based systems (SBS) are essential for constructing, managing and evolving innovative, high-quality and complex systems of the future. Adaptability is a key feature of a service-based system, as such a system needs to adapt to very dynamic environments, including different contexts, locations and different kinds of users. Adaptability requires run-time monitoring, i.e., the ability to detect violations of properties or agreements, or situations of interest.

Current research efforts on Service-based systems engineering, adaptation and monitoring are fragmented, partially overlapping, or even incomplete. As examples, where overlaps exist between research efforts on issues like service composition or coordination, research on monitoring mostly focussed at the service infrastructure layer in isolation.

This fragmentation and overlap can be attributed to three main facts:

1. The organization of research on service based applications typically strictly follows the functional layers of a service-based system: service infrastructure (SI), service composition and coordination (SCC) and business process management (BPM).
2. A significant amount of knowledge on engineering hybrid service-based systems is currently hidden in development approaches and techniques both from SOC and software engineering and is not documented explicitly.
3. Knowledge about the context in which a service or a service-based application is going to operate is currently not adequately considered. For example, knowledge and engineering principles for human-computer interaction (HCI) is almost totally neglected and contextual factors such as service usage are only considered superficially.

As a result, we currently lack a holistic, comprehensive and consistent set of engineering, adaptation and monitoring principles, techniques and methodologies for service-based systems. As a significant consequence, building and managing service-based systems which provide desired end-to-end quality and conform to service level agreements (SLAs) is difficult if not impossible, as the contribution of each of the functional layers to the overall provision of quality is not yet fully understood.

Objectives

The overall objective of this joint research activity (JRA-1) is to devise an integrated set of principles, techniques and methods for engineering, adapting and monitoring hybrid service based applications, while guaranteeing end-to-end quality provision and SLA conformance.

The detailed objectives of this activity are:

• Extracting, abstracting, extending and explicitly documenting the engineering, adaptation and monitoring knowledge that is spread across the functional layers of service infrastructure, service composition and coordination, and business process management.
• Devising engineering principles, techniques and methods for supporting the engineering of hybrid, service based applications by integrating service based and software engineering principles, techniques and methods while considering context factors and HCI aspects (WP-JRA-1.1). This includes support for engineers with different experience and for different development strategies like business-process-driven or exploratory, resource-discovery-based design.
• Promoting the key role of context-awareness and HCI in monitoring and in adaptation, with the aim of providing an integrated set of cross-layer adaptation and monitoring methods that support different degrees of autonomy, and that targets different classes of adaptation needs, e.g., engineer, business analyst, end-user needs (WP-JRA-1.2).
• To devise principles, techniques and methods for ensuring end-to-end quality provision and SLA conformance by taking a holistic view on service infrastructure, service composition and coordination, and business process management and by employing SLAs as key elements to guide the integrated, cross-layer monitoring, and adaptation (WP-JRA-1.3).

Coordination