Trusted autonomic service cooperation model and application development framework

Abstract

To achieve the dynamical on-requirement self-organization and self-evolution of virtual organizations (VOs) by autonomic service cooperation is an excellent approach for developing assembled service-oriented application software systems in the Internet computing environment. However, this approach, due to the fact that the autonomic individual behaviors are difficult to be predicted and controlled, encounters the “trust” crisis of cooperation effect. In order to solve the above crisis, this paper proposes a model of Norm-Governed and Policy-Driven autonomic service cooperation (NGPD). The key idea of NGPD is to constrain and govern the cooperation behaviors and their evolutions of autonomic individuals by formulating systematic standards of social structures and the coupling norms of cooperation behaviors, and thereby the cooperation behaviors (i.e. behaviors for providing and requiring services) of autonomic individuals and the cooperation effect can be controlled, predicted, and then become trusted. Furthermore, NGPD provides the “macro-micro” link mode to support the operation-level implementation of macro-government and creates the policy-driven self-management mechanism for individual behaviors to achieve the mapping from the macro-government to the micro-behaviors. Thus, the effect of the macro-government can be exerted to autonomic individuals so that they can exhibit the intellect for conforming to service contracts and cooperation behavior norms, but still keep high autonomy again. Along with the settlement of this “trust” crisis, NGPD can overcome the limitation introduced by non-autonomic service cooperation, and thus make the autonomy and change-response ability of service cooperation exhibit the advantages of robustness and intelligence which cannot be reached by traditional service cooperation techniques. Furthermore, NGPD also establishes the solid foundation for developing the norm-driven and contract-ensured self-organization of hierarchical cooperation and the cooperation self-adaptation and self-evolution driven by contract-performing circumstance. All of these make the service cooperation-based VOs possess high performance of dynamical on-requirement self-organization and self-evolution.