A context management framework for real-time SOA

Abstract

For the last decade, the area of e-business and e-service has expanded rapidly. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is introduced to create and execute a business process on the Web. In order to create and execute the business process, relevant web services need to be composed or reconfigured based on the business process logic. Traditionally, web services composition and reconfiguration are optimized with service's functional attributes such as quality of service including latency, round trip time, and so on. However, these days, with the evolution of network technology and the growth of mobile device usages, we come to have more various choices to consume the business process from the wired network to the wireless network and from desktop to smart phone. In addition, since the method to access web services becomes diverse, the network environment system come to be more heterogeneous. Therefore, in the process of web service composition and reconfiguration, the non-functional attributes such as client's profile, the current geographical location, and other information has been emerged as another important factor to consider so that the web services which are specifically adapted for the client's current status can be provided. We call the non-function attributes as context. In this paper, we take the various context information to compose or reconfigure web services in a business process and propose two models; Context Agent and Context Manager. Context agent is embedded in client's mobile device, collects client's context information and delivers them to context manager. And the context manager is responsible for a context reasoning to utilize Q-Broker for service composition and Adaptation Manager for service reconfiguration in terms of context.