A reference architecture for self-organizing service-oriented computing

Service orientation promotes a new way to design and implement large-scale distributed applications across organizational and technical boundaries. However, it does not provide sufficient means to cope with the increasing complexity in service-oriented applications. A promising way out of this dilemma is to enable self-organization in service-oriented computing - as advocated in current research initiatives (e.g. the Organic Computing project). Self-organization helps to keep system complexity hidden from human system participants. In this paper, we propose a reference architecture to establish controlled self-organization in a service-oriented environment with respect to existing reference architectures for SOC and self-organization.