Variability-driven selection of services for service compositions

Abstract

In order to deliver services that realize their requirements at low cost, in short time, and with high quality, service engineers reuse existing services for building composite services. For each service that is part of such a composite service and which is offered by a service provider, a service level agreement has to be established and the quality of service has to be monitored. Therefore, in order to keep service management controllable, the overall number of services across all service compositions that are maintained by an organization should be as small as possible. However, currently there exists no technique that would support service engineers in selecting such a minimal set of services when building composite services. By drawing on research results from software product line engineering, we define a service selection process (SeVAR) that exploits the similarities in the requirements in order to select the minimal set of services that achieves the best coverage of those requirements. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.