Title: Consented consumer-centric non-functional property description and composition for SOA-based applications

Authors: Hanane Becha; Daniel Amyot

Addresses: Faculté des Sciences Aix-Marseille Université, Informatique Aix-Montperrin, 6 Avenue du Pigonnet, 13090 Aix-en-Provence, France ' School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Ottawa, 800 King Edward St., Ottawa, Ontario, K1N 6N5, Canada

Abstract: Non-functional properties (NFPs) play an important role in the service-oriented architecture (SOA). Consumer-centric NFPs are the NFPs that should be included in a service description to help service consumers decide whether a given service suits their needs. They can hence be used to enable NFP-based service selection and composition. However, nowadays, NFPs are often simply not advertised or are described in ad-hoc proprietary ways. Three important factors impede on the proper handling of NFPs in service descriptions: 1) the neglect of consumer perspectives in SOA; 2) the lack of adequate descriptive mechanisms for a number of NFPs; 3) a good understanding of NFP composability. This paper contributes a concrete syntax for an externally consented catalogue of 17 consumer-centric NFPs, together with composition algorithms that can be effectively used for defining, selecting, and composing services for NFP-aware SOA-based application designs. A realistic use case is used to illustrate the NFP composition algorithms. The NFP catalogue is also validated through its proof-of-concept integration with a mainstream technology: Web Service Description Language (WSDL).

Keywords: non-functional properties; consumer-centric NFPs; service description; service composition; Web Service Description Language; WSDL; service-oriented architecture; SOA; web services; service selection; consumer perspectives.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWET.2015.073949

International Journal of Web Engineering and Technology, 2015 Vol.10 No.4, pp.355 - 392

Published online: 30 Dec 2015 *

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