Requirements Metadata Driven Dynamic Configuration of Business Processes

Abstract

Services computing is developing towards complex, large-scale infrastructures referred to as the Internet of things and an Internet of services. Cloud computing supports hundreds of thousands of users and applications/services and ensures that these are available on demand, in a reliable and secure way. These infrastructures present many challenges to the design and implementation of systems to manage, protect and tune them. This chapter shows that in order to support the needed interoperability in these infrastructures, such systems must support adaptation based on service semantics and be capable of runtime autonomic behaviour. For engineering such systems, there is a strong need to build on and extend standard software architectures, in particular the service oriented architectures (SOA) and model driven service engineering approaches. Given these requirements, this chapter introduces a model driven approach to a runtime adaptable requirements driven services management system, and presents a theoretical framework building on intention models that are transformed in several steps to dynamic business processes complying with the Web services paradigm and the business process execution language for Web services. These services can be reconfigured at runtime by autonomic behaviours of the management system in line with the intention model. Within the Neptune framework introduced here, the needed modelling languages, model transformations and a runtime environment implementing such an approach are provided. The chapter closes with a case study based on the well known PetShop enterprise application blueprint. The study demonstrates in practice the autonomic adaptation to changes in the services requirements observed at runtime, and concludes with a section highlighting future applications and extensions of the approach.