Consumer-centric non-functional properties of SOA-based services

Abstract

An effective SOA service development approach requires the identification, specification, implementation, aggregation, management and monitoring of service-related Non-Functional Properties (NFPs). However, commonly nowadays, NFPs are often not handled or are handled partially in ad hoc, proprietary ways. In this paper, we focus on providing formal NFP descriptions of SOA-based services to be published along with their functional description. Such descriptions empower service consumers to determine whether a given service is the most appropriate one for their needs and enables them to predict the NFPs of composed services based on the NFPs of their composed underlying services. Our contributions are an externally validated collection of NFPs with a concrete syntax and composition algorithms ready to be used for defining, selecting and composing NFP-driven services.