A flexible architecture for enforcing and composing policies in a service-oriented environment

Abstract

Service Oriented Architectures (SOA's) enable powerful application and end user service composition from independently defined services. The effective deployment of such composed services requires adaptation of and interoperability between services. This challenge can be approached by specifying service composition in policies, and by enforcing these policies in a sophisticated run-time architecture. In this paper, we present an open architecture for enforcing and composing complex policies that can depend on the available services in the environment. Complex polices have typically been studied in the context of policy languages, yet they have never been fully supported in a SOA-based execution environment. We have created a flexible run-time architecture that maximizes interoperability, adaptability and evolution. We have prototyped our architecture on an Enterprise Service Bus and we illustrate how our solution supports realistic and complex policies. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2007.