Building self-adapting services using service-specific knowledge

Abstract

With the advances in middleware and Web services technologies, network sendees are evolving from simple client-sender applications to self-configuring services that can compose primitive components distributed in the Internet into a value-added service configuration that provides rich functionalities to users. A resulting research problem is how to continuously adapt such composite service configurations at run time in order to cope with the increasingly dynamic and heterogeneous network environments and computing platforms. In this paper, we propose a self-adaptation architecture that allows service developers to specify their service-specific adaptation knowledge as "externalized" adaptation strategies. These adaptation strategies are used by a general, shared adaptation framework to perform run-time adaptation operations that automatically incorporate service-specific knowledge. In addition to the strategies, we also identify another aspect of adaptation knowledge that is not addressed by previous solutions: adaptation coordination. Our framework provides integrated support for the specification and execution of both aspects of developers' adaptation knowledge.