Adaptive BPEL Service Compositions via Variability Management: A Methodology and Supporting Platform

摘要

Service-Oriented Architectures are a popular development paradigm to enable distributed applications constructed from independent web services. When coordinated, web services are an infrastructure to fulfill dynamic and vertical integration of business. They may face frequent changes of both requirements and execution environments. Static and predefined service compositions using business process execution language (BPEL) are not able to cater for such rapid and unpredictable context shifts. The authors propose a variability management-based adaptive and configurable service composition approach that treats changes as first-class citizens and consists of identifying, expressing, realizing, and managing changes of service compositions. The proposed approach is realized with a language called VxBPEL to support variability in service compositions and a platform for design, execution, analysis, and maintenance of VxBPEL-based service compositions. Four case studies validate the feasibility of the proposed approach while exhibiting good performance of the supporting platform.