Towards a dependable software paradigm for service-oriented computing

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is an emerging computational paradigm that achieves business goals through dynamic service integration over the Internet. It provides interesting features such as flexible service coordination, dynamic system evolution, and service access control. While these features increase the power and flexibility of computation, they brings along new challenges. This chapter reviews the various challenges of supporting SOC and discusses the issues of addressing them using adaptive service coordination architecture. The architecture is motivated by the principle of solving complex problems through concern separation. For example, our architecture separates the concerns of (a) coordination logic from service entities, (b) service evolution from service interaction, and (c) user-centric trust management from dependability analysis. The concern separation is achieved by four artifacts: a service coordination and evolution model, environment-driven self-adaptation support, a coordination-aware access control mechanism and a trust management framework. The architecture provides a flexible infrastructure by which SOC can be seamlessly supported