Service Network Modeling: A Generic Approach

With the broad adoption of service-orientation for the realization of business applications and their provisioning and usage over open cloud infrastructures, the topology of the resulting service networks is becoming extremely complex. Due to the composition of services for value-added business capabilities and the reusability of a service in multiple compositions, the execution of one service often depends on other services and changes in its provisioning can affect the health of large parts of the service network. The lack of insight on the relationships between the network components makes the management of the service network's health and change impact hard and error prone tasks. This paper proposes a service network modeling approach for capturing the topology of a service network at design time. The model is used to validate the health of the service network to ensure the operability of its services. At run time the model can be applied for analyzing the effects of evolutionary events such as service modification or withdrawal. Our major contributions are a generic and adaptable modeling structure and a classification of service network entities and relationships. The applicability of our approach is demonstrated on an example service network scenario.