Quantitative Analysis of Service-Oriented Architectures

Emerging business models such as digital ecosystems involving collaborative innovation, participatory decision-making and flexible organizational structures are set to significantly affect inter- and intra-enterprise structure and functionality. This has seen the appearance of increasingly complex Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) scenarios featuring various partnership levels, increased resilience and adaptation to tougher compliance regulations, more seamless integration with process layers, etc. This complexity has brought about the need to broaden the SOA paradigm, so as to include business, infrastructure and multi-layering, resulting in an evolved concept known as Service-Oriented Enterprise Architecture (SOEA). This paper aims to describe the way new business and technology paradigms continue to affect the new SOEA approach and how the inherently holistic Enterprise Architecture (EA) frameworks and related practices can support the emerging complex dynamic, multi-layered and value-chained service-based scenario.

Following September 11 2001, company ABC zeroed in on a home-grown fat client system, System E, as the enterprise data warehouse for risk management. It became mission critical for System E to remove key person dependencies and migrate from C++, a niche technology, to a more accessible platform. Under the leadership of a new hire, System E adopted an Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach to re-architecture. As company ABC’s IT unit is under a flat headcount constraint, an incremental SOA approach was the only way to get upper management approval. A pilot is well underway and scheduled to complete in December 2005. This paper presents the current/target architectures of System E, a theoretical framework for SOA, the Unified Modeling Language class diagram for SOA Model at ABC, and concludes with lessons learned from the pilot to date. Key contributions of the paper include SOA Model at ABC, and lessons learned regarding enterprise architecture initiatives.

The paper aims to analyze the possibilities of increasing the reliability level of software applications based on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) by the means of Design by Contract principles and explicit manipulation of business rules. Two architectural approaches have been taken into consideration: process centric SOA and information centric SOA. Also, a comparative analysis regarding the use of process diagrams versus use cases in SOA modeling is presented.

A key indicator of today's global business system supported by service oriented architecture (SOA), is the reliability and uptime. This concern is crucial for e-commerce sites and mission-critical business applications. SOA modelling is used to implement the concept of digital business ecosystem (DBE). In computing environment of DBE a chain of components link business applications together, and the strength of this chain, in terms of reliability and performance, will determine the success or failure of the business. One way to make the chain stronger is to increase the reliability of all components involved, especially the critical components of the chain. In this paper, we address the reliability issue of digital ecosystem's transactions. The major contribution of this research is to propose a framework for reliable transactions in DE, via the analysis of the reliability for Web services computing.

A service-oriented architectural (SOA) model is proposed for power system reliability analysis especially for generating capacity adequacy evaluation. Generating system adequacy evaluation is performed to evaluate the ability of the system generating capacity to meet the total system demand. The proposed SOA model is composed of generation system reliability (GSR) service provider, power system service registry and service requester. The data pertaining to power system reliability analysis are represented in extensible markup language (XML) for exchanging the reliability data among the users and service providers. The GSR service provider describes the reliability evaluation services and publishes them to the power system service registry. The calling sequences of reliability evaluation services along with required data are configured as SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) messages and the proposed SOA model communicates between the service provider and the service requester with formally defined messages. The proposed model for generating system reliability analysis is highly distributed and has inherent features such as scalability and flexibility and provides a loosely coupled environment for power system reliability analysis.

Current learning approaches are teacher oriented. The teacher is in control of the elements of the entire learning process. But different students have different capabilities and constraints. The student should be able to select the teaching style and method that best meets his requirements, while taking into consideration his capabilities and constraints. Due to the wide popularity of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and cloud computing, we propose an extended SOA model. This model extends traditional SOA models to support the provision of richer services that enable service providers to reach a wide range of customers and enable service requesters to find services that best match their requirements taking into consideration their capabilities. In the context of this paper, service providers are course providers and service requesters are the students. This paper also introduces a novel formal model for the specification of our newly introduced richer services.

Business Intelligence and Service Oriented Architecture – Improving IT Investments

Information Technology does not solve business problems. Rather, IT can be used as an enabler to meet goals, targets and position the organization in the minds of the customer. A Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) can enable higher level services from more primitive business processes. The result is a flexible, agile organization. However, in some cases, without a business model, an SOA can be implemented but the result is islands of incompatible services. In the era of data analytics, the evolution of business intelligence has assumed a more dominant role. Proponents argue that Business Intelligence subsumes SOA. Other practitioners argue that Business Intelligence (BI) and SOA are distinct from each other as each aims to deliver different perspectives to an organization. This chapter challenges this view by developing a framework where both SOA and BI are pivotal to delivering the business model. The analytics, business intelligence and data mining handshake with the SOA, allowing decision makers to plan, coordinate and control resources to meet the goals, targets and performance measures set for the organization. Business Intelligence and SOA need not operate on different levels for an organisation. In an era where companies are trying to go from barely surviving IT expenses towards developing an IT portfolio, the more options for technologies supporting asset data management, warehousing and mining to interact and co-exist are necessary. Putting aside arguments of Business Intelligence versus SOA, we propose that they can handshake and bring out the collaborative synergies to enable organizational decision making to address the competitive challenges in today’s global marketplace.KeywordsDecision support and optimization methods and toolsBusiness intelligenceSOA

The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is embraced in distributed and grid computing to produce high performance results for long time. SOA is likened by application programmers for its trademark characteristics of programmability, efficiency in heterogeneous conditions and fault-tolerance. It has worked well for high performance financial applications. but not for scientific applications which are too fine grained and communication intensive to be efficient on distributed environments. This paper argues that to make SOA model work well for those scientific applications, we need to reduce overhead costs associated with smaller task loads arising from finer granularity and increased communications in those applications. This paper proposes a data service to be used along with the existing compute services in SOA middlewares to enable inter-communication of finer tasks with out loosing SOA properties of programmability and efficiency under heterogeneity. This data service shall better enable high performance scientific computing of medium to fine grained scientific applications.

Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) is an approach for building distributed systems that deliver application functionality as a set of business-aligned services with well-defined and discoverable contracts. This paper presents typical a service design process along with a set of service design principles and guidelines for systematically identifying services, designing them and deciding the service granularity and layering. The advocated principles stem from our experiences in designing services for a realistic Securities Trading application. Best practices and lessons learned during this exercise are also discussed.KeywordsBusiness ProcessBusiness ServiceService Orient ArchitectureService DesignService InterfaceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) are increasingly being used for designing and building large-scale networked and distributed systems. Catering to the complex and dynamically varying needs of business applications/clients, these systems must usually be realized by dynamically composing a variety of network-available services. Evaluation of large-scale SOAs, particularly on dynamic network platforms, such as Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs), is a non-trivial problem that requires not only a correct modeling of SOAs and the network platform, but also their relationships. This paper describes a new tool – SOAMANET – to design and rapidly synthesize simulations for the experimental evaluation of SOAs on MANET platforms. With its modeling techniques and analysis capabilities, SOAMANET allows simulation-based and system execution-based analysis of dynamic SOA and/or MANET designs and implementations.

Software development has undergone various stages of paradigms - the very last one is called Object-Oriented (O-O) paradigm. Typical of this paradigm has been culminated by several OO programming languages such as C++, Java and VB. With the advent of Internetworking and evolvement of web technologies, business needs, especially isolated service requests/components, put a new demand on new software architecture. Existing models are examined in the light of their constraints and limitations to meet these constant changing business requirements. Service-oriented Architecture (SOA), as the next generation software architecture and through the utilization of the web service, XML and other related technologies provides viable working solution to implement dynamic e-business. This paper discusses SOA model and how it fits into implementing dynamic e-business solutions.

A fault situation occurs in a SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) to a service, needs to be detected to repair it. It is challenging to guarantee the reliability of service composition in a distributed concurrent, dynamic and complex environment. This paper aims to present fault propagation approach of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) using Petri Nets. The presented approach extends discrete state space techniques to simulate the concurrent and distributed behavior through Petri nets for the SOA systems in the case of faulty situation. Through the performance analysis of our approach, the results demonstrate the feasibility of the approach.

More and more Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is recognized by the industries as the reference blueprint for building interoperable and flexible distributed Enterprise applications, based on open standards such as Web Services (WS). In the state-of-the-art, the programming models for engineering SOA systems proposed by leading industries are essentially component-based, typically based upon object-oriented abstractions and technologies. In this paper we argue that such a choice-which benefits indeed from the well-know advantages of component-based software engineering and from the maturity of the available technologies-does not provide, however, the suitable level of abstraction for modelling as first-class concepts some fundamental aspects in SOA, such as autonomy, control-uncoupling, data-driven interaction, to cite some. Such features instead can be modelled quite naturally by adopting an agent-oriented perspective. Accordingly, we introduce here a programming model for SOA and Web Services called SA&A (Service Agents and Artifacts-based Architecture), based on a general-purpose conceptual model called A&A (Agents and Artifacts). The approach makes it possible to conceive, design and program services (and applications using services) as workspaces where ensemble of proactive activity-oriented entities (agents) work together exploiting different kinds of passive function-oriented entities (artifacts) used as resources and tools to support their business activities.

In this research, a GAP analysis of the ATM service architecture was carried out; as a starting point, the current architecture of the ATM service was analyzed, identifying each of its components that make it up, to determine which components are suggested to be maintained, modified, and eliminated, to reduce the points of failure in the ATM system. In addition, the architecture of the ATM service was analyzed through a technical security procedure based on the good practices of the international Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) regulation. For the present study, a documentary and field research was carried out with data collection techniques such as the structured interview in which the Delphi method was used with 2 iterations, and this method was carried out to obtain efficient communication by the interviewer and the interviewee. In the first iteration, certified experts in computer security were interviewed, and in the second iteration, experts certified in the international PCI DSS standard were interviewed. The instrument used was a checklist, where compliance with the PCI DSS controls focused on the security of the ATM architecture service was evaluated. The results showed that thanks to the implementation of the GAP analysis, it was possible to determine improvements in terms of the diagram that makes up the architecture of the ATM service. In addition, through the technical procedure of the security analysis, the vulnerability of the medium and informative risk level was found. Finally, thanks to the implementation of the checklist and the interview, relevant information on the technological security of an automated teller machine (ATM) was obtained.KeywordsComputer security of ATMsPCI DSSComputer audit at ATMsGAP analysis