QoP and QoS Policy Cognizant Module Composition

Component-based software engineering is generally recognized as one of the best methods to develop, deploy, and manage increasingly complex software systems. To enable the dynamic composition of software modules, it is often required to expose their functionality dependencies. This results the a well-known requires-provides specifications’ model. In this paper, we introduce a framework that enables individual software components to specify their requires-provides interfaces in a policy dependent way. Our framework specifies policies as combinations of Constraint Logic Programming (CLP) based rules. Moreover, our policies are flexible and expressive, allowing the enforcement of multiple aspects for the requested composition including security and quality of service. We apply our framework to specify Quality of Protection (QoP) and Quality of Service (QoS) policies. We demonstrate the applicability of our policy language using as an example a teleconferencing application with diverse requirements for the specification of security and resource policies.