Event-driven actors for supporting flexibility and scalability in service-based integration architecture

Abstract

Service-based software systems are often built by incorporating functionalities from other software systems or platforms. A widely used approach in practice is to introduce an intermediate integration layer for hiding the complexity and heterogeneity of the integrated systems or platforms. However, existing approaches introduce limited support for the flexibility of the integration architecture. It is challenging to alter the integration architecture, e.g., due to some exceptions or unanticipated situations such as peak loads or emergencies, because of rigid dependency structures in the integration architecture defined at design or deployment time. In this paper, we propose DERA as a novel approach that exploits event-driven architecture concepts for enhancing the flexibility and scalability of service-based integration architectures. Our approach provides primitive concepts that can easily be analyzed with tools or be used to depict a current snapshot of the integration architecture using graphical notations close to the intuitive perception of stakeholders. We show the applicability of DERA through an industrial case study in the field of software platform integration and evaluate the scalability of our approach. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.