A Flexible Approach for Modelling and Analysis of Feature Interactions in Service-Oriented Product Lines

摘要

Web services technology provides interoperability between various software applications running on different platforms, allows an organisation or individual to develop more advanced services, and publishing them on the web. Service Composition potentially involves a large number of interactions among services features involved in the process. Generally, most of the interactions are desirable, however, in some scenarios such interactions may lead to undesirable interactions between components that can compromise customer preferences for QoS features such as privacy, security, and personalisation etc. Such interactions are known as feature interactions, and can adversely affect the overall quality of any composite service. A survey of traditional approaches such as (BPEL, WSCDL, OWL-S, and WSMO etc.) shows that none of them offers any direct support for verification of service composition at design time for evaluating its correctness. This demands a flexible approach, capable of specification and analysis of interactions among services features, and guarantee that service composition process yields feature interaction free services. In this paper, a flexible approach is proposed for handling feature interactions problem proactively at domain engineering stage by integrating the Service Orientation and Software Product Lines approaches. With the help of a motivational case study, it has been hypothesised that proposed approach allows a service engineer to model and reason about feature interactions in Service Oriented Product Lines (SOPLs).