Requirements to Services: A Model to Automate Service Discovery and Dynamic Choreography from Service Version Database

Abstract

As the software industry is gradually moving toward the cloud computing in a fast pace, Service oriented architecture (SOA) is increasingly becoming more and more important, as far as the Software As a Service (SAAS) is concerned. As SOA applications are maturing, it becomes imperative to maintain the various versions of services published in the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). However, for implementing a particular requirement, it may not always be cost-efficient, to use the latest version of the services. If a previous version matches the requirement, then that might be a cost-effective solution and enabling “reuse” to a larger extent can be a very useful method in cloud computing domain where pay per use is the accepted norm. In this chapter, we devise a comprehensive framework that models requirements in a formal manner and automatically extracts verbs to generate an activity model, which is then translated into BPMN notation based on a set of transformation rules. The BPMN nodes are mapped to services and an algorithm for dynamic discovery of appropriate service version is conceived. Thereafter we also verify the entire transformation process and ensure correctness by developing a traceability model and generate trace table to trace from requirements till services and apply it for a case study for substantiation of our approach.