Systematic Scalability Modeling of QoS-aware Dynamic Service Composition

Abstract

In Dynamic Service Composition (DSC), an application can be dynamically composed using web services to achieve its functional and Quality of Services (QoS) goals. DSC is a relatively mature area of research that crosscuts autonomous and services computing. Complex autonomous and self-adaptive computing paradigms (e.g., multi-tenant cloud services, mobile/smart services, services discovery and composition in intelligent environments such as smart cities) have been leveraging DSC to dynamically and adaptively maintain the desired QoS, cost and to stabilize long-lived software systems. While DSC is fundamentally known to be an NP-hard problem, systematic attempts to analyze its scalability have been limited, if not absent, though such analysis is of a paramount importance for their effective, efficient, and stable operations. This article reports on a new application of goal-modeling, providing a systematic technique that can support DSC designers and architects in identifying DSC-relevant characteristics and metrics that can potentially affect the scalability goals of a system. The article then applies the technique to two different approaches for QoS-aware dynamic services composition, where the article describes two detailed exemplars that exemplify its application. The exemplars hope to provide researchers and practitioners with guidance and transferable knowledge in situations where the scalability analysis may not be straightforward. The contributions provide architects and designers for QoS-aware dynamic service composition with the fundamentals for assessing the scalability of their own solutions, along with goal models and a list of application domain characteristics and metrics that might be relevant to other solutions. Our experience has shown that the technique was able to identify in both exemplars application domain characteristics and metrics that had been overlooked in previous scalability analyses of these DSC, some of which indeed limited their scalability. It has also shown that the experiences and knowledge can be transferable: The first exemplar was used as an example to inform and ease the work of applying the technique in the second one, reducing the time to create the model, even for a non-expert.