Self-adaptive middleware: Supporting business process priorities and service level agreements

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This paper deals with quality of service, defined at the application level, with respect to business constraints expressed in terms of business processes. We present a set of adaptive methods and rules for routing messages in an integration infrastructure which yields a form of autonomic behavior, namely the ability to dynamically optimize the flow of messages in order to comply with SLAs according to business priorities. EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) infrastructures may be seen as component systems that exchange asynchronous messages over an application bus, under the supervision of a processflow engine that orchestrates the messages. The QoS (Quality of Service) of the global IT system is defined and monitored with SLAs (Service Level Agreements) that apply to each business process. The goal of this paper is to propose routing strategies for message handling that maximize the ability of the EAI system to meet these requirements in a self-adaptive and self-healing manner, i.e., its ability to cope with sudden variations of the event flow or temporary failures of a component system. These results are a first contribution towards deployment of autonomic computing concepts into BPM (Business Process Management) architectures. This approach marks a departure from previous approaches in which QoS constraints are pushed to the lower level (e.g., the network). Although the techniques, such as adaptive queuing, are similar, managing QoS at the business process level yields more flexibility and robustness.