Design Of Service-oriented Systems Research Articles

A New Semi-Automated Method for Service Identification

Service identification plays a key role in the design of service-oriented systems. There are non-model-based and model-based methods for extracting services from business processes. These methods suggest a set of mostly descriptive solutions that do not pay sufficient attention to service design guidelines and the conceptual relations between tasks. The challenge is to develop an algorithm to automatically identify services from business processes to simplify the analysis and reduce the gap between information technology and business needs. In this paper, we develop a semi-automated service identification method that addresses this gap. This method incorporates the Goal, Data, and Business Process Models (BPM) to identify services based on related tasks, shared data, and business requirements. It advances previous methods by simultaneously considering both semantic and structural relations between tasks which permits better and more accurate identification of services. Moreover, the proposed method considers the principles of service design such as internal cohesion of service methods, loose coupling of services, and reusability of the identified services.

A Requirements Analysis Framework for Development of Service Oriented Systems

In Service Oriented Systems (SOS), implementation of business processes is accomplished through services in distributed, loosely coupled manner based on business process requirements of the users. Consequently, importance of businessprocess requirements analysis for development of SOS is strongly highlighted in both academia and industry. Usually, traditional requirements engineering is competent enough to specify and analysis business requirements for development of software systems efficiently. However, Service Oriented Requirement Engineering (SORE) emerging for SOS development is differed from traditional requirement engineering due to complex nature of services. Yet, a serious gap is still exist between early and detailed specification of business process requirements in SORE and further mapping towards design of SOS from set of business processes. To address this issue, in this paper, a requirements analysis framework is proposed for development of SOS systems. The contribution of the proposed work is formal representation of business process requirements for SOS based on business scenario and Cause-Effect-Dependency (CED) graph in dimensions of six aspects of services -- What, Why, How, Who, When and Where (5W1H). Both early and detailed level requirements analysis in the context of SORE is facilitated by the proposed approach. Beside, traceability of proposed approach towards design of business processes for development of SOS is also exhibited in this paper. Moreover, the practical utility of the proposed approach is demonstrated using a suitable case study.

A Service-Oriented Method for System-of-Systems Requirements Analysis and Architecture Design

Nowadays various problems, including the rapid growth of complexity, continually changing requirements and the alignment of IT with business strategy, challenge traditional design principles in analyzing System-of-systems (SoS), while Service-Oriented Computing offers a flexible integration architecture to meet the dynamic requirements of SoS. This paper introduce a service-oriented modeling method for SoS requirements analysis based on a three-tier framework with multi-ontologies. The method provides a reusable and flexible solution for SoS requirements modeling and enable the high level requirements description of System-of-Systems can be mapped to service-oriented system design architecture directly. A case study is given to demonstrate the applicability of the method.

Service-oriented system evolution taxonomy and metrics derived from complex adaptive systems theory

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is designed to enable integration of heterogeneous business components, and thus is argued to improve enterprise evolution and agility. In order to identify service-oriented system evolution taxonomy, it is suggested to build on complex adaptive systems (CAS) theory that interprets phenomenon of evolution and emergence of new properties. This required a survey of service-oriented system design and development techniques and principles, and their mapping to CAS evolutionary principles. Based on this analysis, the paper identifies four major categories of service-oriented system evolution: a) service structural properties, e.g., flexibility of service, loose coupling, re-usability, etc.; b) enterprise enabling factors, e.g., enterprise architecture, organisation structure and management style; c) evolution dynamics, e.g., interactions within the enterprise and with users, prototyping, iterative and incremental development in SOA realisation, etc.; d) controlling factors, e.g., continuous reflection, learning and adjustment supported by formalised standards in SOA programming, SOA quality attributes and SOA governance techniques. This led to deriving a process model utilising these four categories to enable service-oriented system evolution. Metrics are suggested to benchmark system structural properties and controlling factors, including SOA flexibility, SOA quality attributes and SOA governance to ensure sustainable evolution and avoiding disordered results in response to change.

Design of Service-Oriented Systems Using SODA

We propose a design methodology, Service-Oriented Design with Aspects (SODA), for service-oriented systems to address the need to continually upgrade and evolve services while maintaining various versions. Our approach treats aspects as first-class design elements and consistently applies the concept of aspect to all phases of design and evaluation. At the early design stages, crosscutting concerns are first separated out as aspects, and then, services are composed by weaving the different design elements together. The behavior of aspects and services is represented as basic Petri Nets and we present rules for weaving together Petri Nets so as to obtain behavior of the integrated system (with aspects crosscutting services). Even at the evaluation stages, performance and resource data are separated out as aspects to be woven in to the design so as to enable advanced analysis using Petri Net tools. A small order service example is used to illustrate our approach.