Policy‐driven customization of cross‐organizational features in distributed service systems. (13th October 2011)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Walraven, Stefan; Lagaisse, Bert; Truyen, Eddy; Joosen, Wouter
• Other Names: Kapitza Rüdiger guestEditor.
• Is Part Of: Software, practice & experience. Volume 43:Number 10(2013)
• Page Start: 1145
• Page End: 1163
• Publication Date: 2011-10-13
• Subjects: cross‐organizational -- feature‐oriented -- service engineering -- dynamic composition; Computer software -- Periodicals; Computer programming -- Periodicals; Computer programs -- Periodicals; 005.3
• DOI: 10.1002/spe.1128
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0038-0644

Abstract

SUMMARY: In a cross‐organizational context, software services are provided and consumed by different organizations. Ensuring that the non‐functional requirements of all the involved organizations are satisfied is hard to achieve in such a distributed and heterogeneous environment: the implementation of features, for example, security, is scattered across the services of multiple organizations. In this paper, we present a coordination architecture for flexible and policy‐driven composition of cross‐organizational features in distributed service systems. The underlying approach of this architecture is to specify the features and their composition at a higher level that abstracts the internal implementation mechanisms of the organizations involved. By means of feature composition policies, the organizations specify at a fine‐grained level which features are required and when they have to apply. Driven by these policies, our coordination middleware dynamically integrates the appropriate features throughout the cross‐organizational service composition in a consistent and efficient way. We have validated our architecture in a proof of concept showing limited performance overhead. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.