Realisation Mechanisms for Service-based Systems (JRA-2)

by Branimir Wetzstein — last modified Sep 16, 2009 11:57

Motivation

The full potential of services as a means of developing service based applications will only be realised when IT systems and business processes are able to integrate their complex interactions into composite added value services. The current state of the art provides an evidence of fragmentation of the research activities in the field of service composition and coordination with respect to

the approaches used,
the applied technologies,
the basic theoretical principles.

Multiple research communities strive to improve the available mechanisms and techniques from the point of view of a single perspective only and integration of effort across communities is not existent. Those communities include BPM, SOC, software engineering, and semantics.

As a result, overlapping or disparate solutions for problems in service composition and coordination have been developed, which are difficult to combine in a meaningful and comprehensive technological underpinning for business processes; the existing technologies and mechanisms are costly and virtually impossible to integrate. This is mostly because engineering approaches and solutions on solving problems piecewise are being developed in the three functional service based applications layers – business process management, service composition and coordination and service infrastructure (including grid computing), with no focus on a common research agenda.

Moreover, the obvious dependencies among these disciplines have been neglected in the past in order to reduce complexity, however precisely these interdependencies are the glue for making these disparate approaches work together. The current research efforts are hence dispersed, solving similar problems with multiple, similar or overlapping approaches. Convergence of these approaches and mechanisms is therefore needed. Integrating the mechanisms enabling the technological support for business processes on all the functional levels fosters identifying and filling the gaps in the overall technology landscape in this area and will contribute to reaching a common understanding and technological best practices.

Resolving the challenges that must be addressed in this activity will take into account multiple techniques, mechanisms and requirements coming from the different functional layers typical for the existing approaches towards Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) support, and will aim at resolving the conflicts and overlaps among them, as well as identifying and tackling the gaps. Advancing the state-of the art can be done only if the research activities of all beneficiaries are re-aligned to a common research agenda.

Objectives

The main goal of this activity is to enable the integration of the different achievements of related, yet different, research areas in order to enable seamless and comprehensive support for the three functional layers of SOA. The overall grand goal is thus to create a general framework capable of supporting business processes by means of adaptive services and service compositions. These services and service compositions will, in turn, be composed and will run on a distributed and self-healing infrastructure supporting efficient and dynamic service discovery mechanisms.

This activity groups several established research institutes working on different research areas. The research areas are reflected by the division of this activity into workpackages. These areas and workpackages are:

The research objective of the activity is leveraging existing approaches for service based systems development, and build on them to provide an improved and integrated approach that addresses the still open issues in this area. Of utmost importance we consider research exploiting the dependencies among the existing functional layers of SOA and enabling their seamless integration. In particular, we aim at enacting agile service nets and business transactions in terms of coordinated and dynamic service compositions to be run on adaptive, self-configurable service infrastructure.

To make the advancement in the state of the art in mechanisms for service based systems possible, this activity will be managed with the precise aim of fostering the exchange of experiences among the different research institutions by means of researcher exchange programs. Thereby the aim will be to reshape research agendas of all beneficiaries of the activities in order to enable durable integration of their research activities.

All the results achieved by this activity will contribute heavily, and directly, to the S-Cube convergence knowledge model, will be utilized for new teaching modules in the Virtual Campus activities and will be aligned with industry needs.