Project contact: marlon.dumas (at) stacc.ee

The overall aim of this sub-project is to develop a framework for rapid and lightweight integration and management of software service networks. Software service networks consist of software services that are interconnected either directly or indirectly and that affect each other or partly depend on each other during their entire life cycle. The emphasis of the project is on compliance management, SLA management, and identification and exploitation of integration points in order to improve the usage of service networks.

Agile interoperation in service networks

Many government and enterprise applications nowadays require access to external data sources that are exposed as web services (e.g. services provided by the Estonian X-Road infrastructure). A significant share of the effort in the development of such applications goes into building wrappers and adapters to reconcile differences between the data models used by the external information source, and the data models used internally by the application. In addition to requiring significant effort, the development of such adapters is error-prone, since analysts and developers may easily misunderstand some of the data items exposed by the external information source, particularly when the documentation is scarce and incomplete. Moreover, such wrappers and adapters need to be continuously maintained, bringing in additional costs. Even worse, in some cases the external information source may evolve unexpectedly and the wrappers/adapters may start misfunctioning as a result of such changes. Such events may go unnoticed for some time, leading to subtle errors that are only detected after they ripple down into other more noticeable and costly errors.

In this work package, we will investigate the state-of-the-art in information integration, and we will identify and apply leading-edge techniques to generate and to continuously maintain wrappers and adapters for the purpose of integrating external web-based information sources exposed as web services, into enterprise applications. 

Smart monitoring in service networks

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are an essential component in today’s networked enterprise systems. SLAs establish non-functional requirements (typically performance-related) that must be fulfilled by an enterprise system during its day-to-day operations. In the context of service networks, failure by a service to meet its SLA may ripple down into further failures by other services in the network. For example, if a service X uses another service Y provided by a different organisation, and service Y fails to fulfil its SLA for a certain period of time, this SLA violation by Y may lead to failure by X to deliver on its SLA. It is therefore important that SLA is continuously monitored at various places in the service network, so that SLA violations by a service can be tracked down to either the service in question, or other services in the network. In addition, it is desirable that such violations are detected and reported as early as possible.

Beyond pure SLA violations, enterprise architects need to understand how variations in the performance of a service are affected by variations in the performance of other services. To this end, this project will design and develop proof-of-concept tools to visualise the performance of a service network in real time. Importantly, this visualisation will not focus on the performance at the technology layer (e.g. network latency and bandwidth), but will display performance at the business level.

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