Service Relationships Management for Maintenance and Evolution of Service Networks

摘要

The Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm is broadly accepted for the realization of business capabilities. Hence, the maintenance and evolution of Service Networks (SN) as systems comprising multiple service-based applications is becoming a growing issue. The larger a service inventory grows and the more often services are reused, the more consequences a service change or fault can cause on related applications in the SN. While reducing the adaptation complexity of a single solution, the realization of business processes as service compositions introduces logical relations defined implicitly between the technically independent services. To preserve the consistency in the whole SN, maintenance and evolution processes have to consider all relations to the changing configuration item. We present a framework for collection, validation, and representation of service relationship information. Contributions of the proposed solution include a semi-automatic approach for relationship identification, a mechanism for completeness and consistency validation, and a tailor-made representation of relations according to stakeholder needs.