Model-based management of service composition

Promoted by the Service Computing paradigm, service composition has played an important role in modern software development. Currently, available services have covered a wide spectrum of heterogeneity, including SOAP services, RESTful services and other data services. The composite services should continuously serve for a large number of users. The heterogeneity and open dynamic network environment bring grand challenges to the management of service composition. Based upon our previous work on service composition middleware - Starlink, and a runtime system management tool - SMART, this paper proposes a model-based approach to service composition management at run time. A runtime model enables casual connections between applications and supporting platforms, provides a global view of a running system, abstracts underlying technical details, and performs automated generation of management code. By constructing the runtime model of Starlink and using the SM@RT tool to generate synchronization between model and running composition, our approach makes the following contributions to service composition management: (1) a more comprehensive view of service composition management; (2) an easy-of-use manner to perform management operations at model level without underlying tedious details; (3) an on-the-fly effect on running system by means of synchronization between the model and composite services. We demonstrate that our approach can tackle the challenge of service composition management by using a case study of a photo sharing composite service application.