Dynamic Binding Framework for Adaptive Web Services

Abstract

Dynamic selection and composition of autonomous and loosely-coupled Web services is increasingly used to automate business processes. The typical long-running characteristic of business processes imposes new management challenges such as dynamic adaptation of running process instances. To address this, we developed a policy-based framework, named manageable and adaptable service compositions (MASC) , to declaratively specify policies that govern: (1) discovery and selection of services to be used, (2) monitoring to detect the need for adaptation, (3) reconfiguration and adaptation of the process to handle special cases (e.g., context-dependant behavior) and recover from typical faults in service-based processes. The identified constructs are executed by a lightweight service-oriented management middleware named MASC middleware. We implemented a MASC proof-of-concept prototype and evaluated it on stock trading case study scenarios. We conducted extensive studies to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed techniques and illustrate the benefits of our approach in providing adaptive composite services using the policy-based approach. Our performance and scalability studies indicate that MASC middleware is scalable and the introduced overhead are acceptable.