Market-awareness in Service-based Systems
Résumé
Service-based systems are service consumer applications built by composing pre-existing services. Both, service providers and consumers are on a service market that is constantly changing. We see different problems in the way service-based systems are currently carried out. On the one hand, consumers define requested services using specifications that depend on the current knowledge of the market. Such specifications may become obsolete due to the continued improvements in the QoS of the services in the market. On the other hand, service providers are passive entities waiting to be discovered by the service consumers. In this work, we propose a framework to support both, consumers and service providers to be aware of the changes in the market. With our approach consumers are able to specify the required QoS using abstract specifications that will be eventually concretized at runtime and according to real characteristics of the market. Services are represented by active software agents. These agents are collectively aware of themselves and what the market requires. Agents are able of creating and maintaining virtual organizations that not just wait to be discovered but also react actively to demands of the market providing self-adaptation capabilities to service-based systems. Explanations of the current prototype are provided.