Bundling and Configuration of Services

seekda is participating and driving this Austrian funded project which is a big step towards allowing people to combine services available on the Web, in particular in the e-Tourism scenario.

Abstract:

The mission of the Service Bundler project is to study, design, develop and prototype an open, self-adaptive and generic SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) integrated platform with its primary research focus on composition and monitoring of services. We will develop a Service Bundler business-pervasive platform that will enable to integrate, compose and expose in a secure and adaptive way innovative services. This will be done by applying business rules and self-adaptive decision-support guidelines to guarantee the best combination of the needed services by taking into account the business context. The role of the Service Bundler project would be to provide a set of core technologies for the base seekda Service Platform. We aim to allow the use of abstract process templates – enabling the composition of available Web Services – such that, with the support of a monitoring mechanism, they can be executed consecutively without any user interaction in-between. Even if some of these services would not perform as initially expected, these should remain transparent to the end user. From an external perspective, such a composition (or bundle as we call it in this proposal) of services would act like one service, offering a specific eCommerce functionality. To achieve this functionality, services are executed in an ordered fashion. Such execution is hidden behind seekda's platform without the user's intervention or awareness.

The Service Bundler project will focus its effort on the following aspects of the Web Services lifecycle and will provide the following components for the seekda Service Platform:

• Service Composition enabling design of service bundles and allowing finding and assembling together specific services that complete a bundle template’s requirements and constraints
• Service Monitoring facilitating collection of information from the instantiated service bundles as well as from any other components during the bundling and execution phases

Key Facts

• Partners: University of Innsbruck
• Funded by: Österreichische Forschungsförderungsgesellschaft mbH (FFG)
• Objective: Producing a set of tools that easily enable the configuration, composition and monitoring of services
• Homepage: http://seekda.com/research/service-bundler

Deliverables (restricted):

• D1.1 - Requirements analysis and problem definition.
• D2.1 - Survey on Existing Systems
• D2.2 - Initial Architecture (Configurator)
• D2.3 - Parameter Language
• D3.1 - Survey on Monitoring of Web Services
• D3.2 - Initial Architecture (Monitoring)
• D4.1 - Survey on existing Business Process Execution Engines
• D4.2 - Service Bundling Platform Initial Architecture Design