An approach to adapt service requests to actual service interfaces

Abstract

Research about service oriented architectures produced, in the last years, some frameworks that enable the development of self-adaptive service compositions supporting dynamic binding. A developer can specify, at design time, an abstract service. At run time a concrete implementation of the abstract service is dynamically selected. In this scenario service selection is usually performed assuming that all the implementations of an abstract service have the same interface or protocol. This assumption is not necessarily true in an open world setting, where services built by different organizations are made available. In this paper we address the problem of invoking services having an interface or protocol different from those originally expected by the service requester. We have identified a number of possible mismatches between services and some basic mapping functions that can be used to solve simple mismatches. Such mapping functions can be combined in a script to solve complex mismatches. Scripts can be executed by a mediator that receives an operation request, parses it, and eventually performs the needed adaptations. The definition of the scripts can be partially automated.