A Novel Architecture for Requirement-Oriented Participation Decision in Service Workflows

Abstract

The internet-of-things (IoT) technology allows auto-organized and intelligent entities such as services to be interoperable and able to act independently. This enables the advanced form of service composition by allowing individual services to dynamically form a service workflow. In this context, services possess different requirements where the compliance of such requirements reflects trust-based decision for participating in a workflow. Large-scale service interoperations pose significant challenges for compliance checking of those requirements. These include inconsistency of requirements that can be represented in different formats and dynamicity, where a workflow can be modified based on service creation, modification, or termination. These factors directly affect the decision of a service to be part of a workflow. To solve these problems, service workflow specification (SWSpec) has been proposed as a consistent and uniformed representation of requirements, and algorithms based on constrained truth table (CTT) have been developed for automatic compliance checking. In this paper, the architecture of these elements is created to facilitate 1) a workflow owner in specifying properties of services to be part of a workflow and 2) services to express their requirements where their compliance reflects trust-based participation decision.