A graph-based design framework for services

Abstract

Service-oriented systems rely on software applications that offer services through the orchestration of activities performed by external services procured on the fly when they are needed. This paper presents an overview of a graph-based framework developed around the notions of service and activity module for supporting the design of service-oriented systems in a way that is independent of execution languages and deployment platforms. The framework supports both behaviour and quality-of-service constraints for the discovery, ranking and selection of external services. Service instantiation and binding are captured as algebraic operations on configuration graphs. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.