A proactive solution to manage web service unavailability in service oriented software systems

Abstract

A service oriented application consists of component web services which cooperate with each other to offer the desired functionality. Due to the distributed and unpredictable nature of the underlying environment, the component web services have uncertain dependability characteristics. This paper looks into the issue of web service availability. The paper proposes a proactive framework to manage the situation when third party web services become unavailable. Software agents are employed to monitor web services on the provider side. The framework is implemented in J2EE, using JADE environment for creating and deploying software agents. Experimental analysis shows that the proposed solution is effective and behaves considerably well when availability of component web services is varied from 0% to 100%.