ICSE 2012 Workshops
2012 34th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)
Powered by
Conference Publishing Consulting

2012 First International Workshop on European Software Services and Systems Research - Results and Challenges (S-Cube), June 5, 2012, Zurich, Switzerland

S-Cube 2012 – Proceedings

Contents - Abstracts - Authors

First International Workshop on European Software Services and Systems Research - Results and Challenges (S-Cube)

Preface

Title Page


Foreword
The rapid evolution of software technology has brought monumental changes to virtually every market sector and has created enormous opportunities for innovation. One such opportunity is developing innovative systems through the composition of software services available over the Internet. Those services have the power to provide utility to users in a much more dynamic and flexible way than is possible with traditional software technology. However, service-oriented systems and their corresponding software services require fundamental changes to the way software is developed, deployed and maintained. Software that constitutes a service-oriented system is no longer owned by one single organization but is distributed and shared amongst many organizations. This distributed ownership opens up a whole range of challenges, including the design, evolution, adaptation and quality assurance of service-oriented systems.

Research Roadmap

Research Challenges on Adaptive Software and Services in the Future Internet: Towards an S-Cube Research Roadmap
Andreas Metzger, Klaus Pohl, Mike Papazoglou, Elisabetta Di Nitto, Annapaola Marconi ORCID logo, and Dimka Karastoyanova
(University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany; Tilburg University, Netherlands; Politecnico di Milano, Italy; Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy; University of Stuttgart, Germany)
This paper introduces research challenges on future service-oriented systems and software services. Those research challenges have been identified in a coordinated effort by researchers under the umbrella of the EU FP7 Network of Excellence S-Cube. We relate this effort to previous and related research roadmap activities and discuss the approach and results on identifying and assessing those challenges.

Service Life-Cycle and Software Engineering

Modeling to Support Communication and Engineering of Service-Oriented Software
Maryam Razavian, Damian A. Tamburri, Qing Gu, and Patricia Lago
(VU University Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Our research focus is on social and sustainable service-oriented software engineering. From a social point of view, understanding social structures in service-oriented software engineering can lead to better software (as phrased in Conway’s law). From a sustainable point of view, notational, methodological and technological support for service-oriented software engineering should aim at retaining past investments (in e.g. legacies), simplifying development processes and addressing global problems like the increasing need for remote collaboration, and the increasing scarcity of energy resources hence demanding for energy efficient solutions. In the S-Cube project the research group adopted a model-driven approach to support the communication about, and engineering of, service-oriented software. Models, views and viewpoints have been defined to support three main research problems in service-oriented software engineering: How to guide migration of legacy assets to services? How agile service networks can support virtual communities aimed at global software engineering? How to support architects and engineers to think in a service-oriented way? This research summary presents the three research topics we tackled, the related research questions and an overview of results addressed and developed in the context of the S-Cube project.

A models@runtime Framework for Designing and Managing Service-Based Applications
Erwan Daubert, François Fouquet, Olivier Barais, Gregory Nain, Gerson Sunye, Jean-Marc Jézéquel, Jean-Louis Pazat, and Brice Morin
(INRIA, France; IRISA, France; University of Rennes 1, France; SINTEF, Norway)
Coordinating the configurations of Services, Orchestrations, Execution Platform and Infrastructure layers in a Service-Based environment is a significant challenge for software industry. In recent years, it has become even more difficult, because infrastructure solutions such as AmazonEC2, Cloudstack or RackSpace have increasingly rich capabilities, allowing for example, the infrastructure/platform/application dynamic adaptations. To address this challenge, in the context of the S-Cube Network of Excellence, we have proposed a domain specific modelling language to describe the whole Service-Based Applications layers entities using a models@runtime-based approach to cover the life-cycle of such applications. Our approach allows (i) to keep a representation of all the layers of a services-based applications, (ii) to coordinate the cross-layer reconfiguration and adaptations and (iii) to provide a support for infrastructure elasticity and (re)configuration to meet the resource requirements and some applications-specific constraints. The approach is implemented by a framework, named Kevoree. This paper summarizes the main concepts used in Kevoree and the main features designed in the context of the S-Cube project.

SOLÚBTHA: A Flexible Business Transaction Model
Rafiqul Haque and Ita Richardson
(Lero, Ireland; University of Limerick, Ireland)
The increasing trend of organizations moving toward service based applications (SBAs) for performing business operations leads to enormous complexity in designing business transactions. Traditional models do not have adequate ability to underpin the design of SBA business transactions. This research offers a business transaction model that facilitates incorporating business entities into a transaction model while also providing techniques to build a flexible business transaction model.

Research Challenges on Engineering Service-Oriented Applications
Elisabetta Di Nitto, Dominik Meiländer, Sergei Gorlatch, Andreas Metzger ORCID logo, Harald Psaier, Schahram Dustdar, Maryam Razavian, Damian A. Tamburri, and Patricia Lago
(Politecnico di Milano, Italy; University of Münster, Germany; University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany; Vienna University of Technology, Austria; VU University Amsterdam, Netherlands)
This paper focuses on providing an overview of the research challenges that have been identified toward the end of the S-Cube network in the area of service engineering. These challenges concern the need for agility and dynamicity of the development process for service-based applications, the importance of focusing on proper approaches to support migration of legacy application into service-based applications and the role of humans and of teams of humans in service-based applications.

Service Technology Foundations

Process Instance Migration: Flexible Execution of Distributed Business Processes
Kristof Hamann, Sonja Zaplata, and Winfried Lamersdorf
(University of Hamburg, Germany)
This research summary outlines results achieved by Hamburg University during its participation in the EU NoE S-Cube focusing on process instance migration. It includes corresponding results in the context of dynamic and mobile environments (as, e.g., provided by mobile web services, NFC-aware process execution, future-context-aware applications or interactive workflows) and focuses on the management of mobile processes as, e.g., ad-hoc monitoring and management, process as a service etc.

Causes-Based Problems in Business Process Compliance Based Management
Francois Hantry and Mohand-Said Hacid
(Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, France)
Today, a trend in Business Process Management (BPM) research is the study of techniques and paradigms that can handle agility. Thus, trend is also to decompose complex business processes for different purposes such as reuse or understanding. However, the cross cutting essence of compliance rules is orthogonal to any traditional ‘block’ building or hierarchical based decomposition of a business process. In this abstract, we address the problem of decomposition of business processes given a set of compliance rules. To summarize, we provide a sound categorization of contributing subformula occurrences in an artifact system A w.r.t to an LTL-FO formula. We give a complexity result for computing an explanation of compliance. Furthermore, one provided a method to extract all explanations. This method is built on the computation of all the high level minimal unsatisfiable subsets of constraints in a Satisfiability Modulo Theory problem using uninterpreted predicates (relational) except for the following one (ℕ, <).

A Holistic Service Provisioning Solution for Federated Cloud Infrastructures
Attila Kertesz, Gabor Kecskemeti, Zsolt Neméth, Marc Oriol, and Xavier Franch
(MTA SZTAKI, Hungary; Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain)
Cloud Computing builds on the latest achievements of diverse research areas, such as Grid Computing, Service-oriented computing, business process modeling and virtualization. As this new computing paradigm was mostly lead by companies, several proprietary systems arisen. Recently, alongside these commercial systems, several smaller-scale privately owned systems are maintained and developed. In this paper we present our research results performed within the S-Cube European FP7 NoE project to enable automated service provisioning for users on a highly dynamic infrastructure consisting of multiple Cloud providers. We developed a Federated Cloud Management architecture that provides unified access to a federated Cloud that aggregates multiple heterogeneous IaaS Cloud providers in a transparent manner. We have also incorporated an integrated monitoring approach that enables more reliable provider selection in these heterogeneous environments.

Research Challenges on Service Technology Foundations
Dimka Karastoyanova, Manuel Carro, Dragan Ivanović, Claudia Di Napoli, Maurizio Giordano, Zsolt Neméth, and Cesare Pautasso
(University of Stuttgart, Germany; TU Madrid, Spain; IMDEA Software Institute, Spain; ICIB-CNR, Italy; MTA SZTAKI, Hungary; University of Lugano, Switzerland)
This work gives an overview of the future research challenges on enabling technologies for service-based applications that have been identified in the network of excellence S-Cube. Service-based applications comprise three layers: business processes, service compositions and services and service infrastructures. The goal of this work is to present a roadmap for future research in technologies for software and system services.

Multi-layer and Mixed-Initiative Monitoring and Adaptation

Cost-Based Prevention of Violations of Service Level Agreements in Composed Services Using Self-Adaptation
Philipp Leitner, Schahram Dustdar, Branimir Wetzstein, and Frank Leymann
(Vienna University of Technology, Austria; University of Stuttgart, Germany)
Providers of composite Web services face the challenge of having to comply to SLAs, which are agreements governing the minimum performance that customers can expect from a composite service. In this work, a framework for optimizing adaptations of service compositions with regards to SLA violations has been developed. The framework, dubbed PREvent (Prediction and Prevention of SLA Violations Based on Events), uses techniques from the areas of machine learning and heuristic optimization to construct models for prediction of SLA violations at runtime, and to decide which adaptation actions may be used to improve overall performance in a composition instance. An optimizer component decides, whether applying these changes makes sense economically (i.e., whether the costs of violating the SLAs are bigger than the adaptation costs). If this is the case, the respective actions are applied in an automated way. At its core, PREvent is a self-optimizing system in the sense of autonomic computing, with the target of minimizing the total costs of adaptations and SLA violations for the service provider.

Adaptivity in Dynamic Service-Based Systems
Antonio BucchiaroneORCID logo, Raman Kazhamiakin, Annapaola Marconi ORCID logo, and Marco Pistore
(Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy)
Adaptivity for service-based systems is one of the most challenging research problems to fully exploit the dinamicity promised by the service paradigm. In this paper we present the research results achieved by the FBK SOA Unit within the S-Cube Network, aiming at addressing key challenges in this area: context-aware adaptation, user-centric adaptation, cross- and multi-layer adaptation.

Chemical Programming for Adaptation in Service-Based Applications
Claudia Di Napoli and Maurizio Giordano
(ICIB-CNR, Italy)
Service-Based Applications (SBAs) life-cycle, i.e. their design, development, maintenance and deployment, presents several challenging problems concerning their management in open and heterogeneous environments they operate in. The possibility to adopt nature-inspired methodologies to support adaptation, at the service infrastructure level, when selecting services that compose an SBA is presented in this contribution according to the research path followed in the S-Cube project, reporting the obtained results.

Research Challenges on Multi-layer and Mixed-Initiative Monitoring and Adaptation for Service-Based Systems
Annapaola Marconi ORCID logo, Antonio BucchiaroneORCID logo, Konstantinos Bratanis, Antonio Brogi, Javier Cámara, Dimitris Dranidis, Holger Giese, Raman Kazhamiakin, Rogério De Lemos, Clarissa Cassales Marquezan ORCID logo, and Andreas Metzger
(Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy; SEERC, Greece; University of Pisa, Italy; University of Coimbra, Portugal; HPI, Germany; SAYservice, Italy; University of Kent, UK; University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany)
Adaptation of complex service-based systems is one of the most challenging research problems for the Future Internet. A considerable effort has been dedicated in recent years to address this problem. However, there are still several important issues that call for concrete solutions. In this paper, we present a set of research challenges for muti-layer and mixed-initiative adaptation and monitoring that may guide the research in this area for the next 5-10 years.

Online Service Quality Prediction for Proactive Adaptation

Analyzing Service-Oriented Systems Using Their Data and Structure
Dragan Ivanović, Manuel Carro, and Manuel Hermenegildo
(TU Madrid, Spain; IMDEA Software Institute, Spain)
We describe our approaches to enhance consistency validation and QoS prediction in service-oriented systems by making use of data properties and the structure of workflows and service compositions.

Verification and Testing at Run-Time for Online Quality Prediction
Andreas Metzger, Eric Schmieders, Osama Sammodi, and Klaus Pohl
(University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany)
This paper summarizes two techniques for online failure prediction allowing to anticipate the need for adaptation of service-oriented systems: (1) SPADE, employing run-time verification to predict failures of service compositions. (2) PROSA, building on online testing to predict failures of individual services.

Research Challenges on Online Service Quality Prediction for Proactive Adaptation
Andreas Metzger, Chi-Hung Chi, Yagil Engel, and Annapaola Marconi ORCID logo
(University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany; Tsinghua University, China; IBM Research, Israel; Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy)
Online quality prediction allows service-oriented systems to anticipate the need for adaptation and thus to prevent the actual occurrence of failures or to mitigate upcoming failures. Such proactive adaptation capabilities are increasingly relevant for future service-oriented systems, which need to cope with limited control over third-party services, as well as rapidly changing usage contexts. Initial, promising results have been achieved for what concerns online quality prediction for service-oriented systems. However, there are many challenging issues remaining that call for concrete solutions. In this paper we present a set of research challenges identified by the research community that may be worth investigating in the coming years.

proc time: 0.45