Management Services – A Framework for Design

Abstract

The Service-Oriented Architecture has rapidly become the de facto standard for modern information systems. Although recently considerable research attention has been paid to the management of services, several gaps can still be observed. Service management as far as it is automated is either mixed up with the operational service logic itself, or handled in a separate not serviceoriented system, such as a BAM platform. In addition, there is a growing business demand for value-driven service management. In this paper, a general framework for management service design is presented that covers both business services and software services and is rooted in the business ontology REA, extended with a REA management ontology. The framework is applied to two different case studies, one in the Italian wine industry and one related to a robot cleaner.

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“…Along with Service-Oriented Architectures, the first decade of this century has witnessed increased research efforts on self-adaptive or autonomic software. Self-adaptive software embodies a closed-loop control mechanism that includes sensors and effectors, linked through processes of monitoring, detecting, deciding and acting [24]. This control loop is taken by Bartels as the backbone for Smart Computing [4].…”

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“…Control services involve the creation of management systems, managing the consistency and quality of products coming to/from the company. It also involves the development of programs and processes that operate automatically [34].…”

“…Coordination Service: Co-ordination services can be defined as services supporting an exchange process (a set of events) for a good or a service [34]. Processes like identification, negotiation, order execution and after-sales take place in a good exchange as well as a service exchange.…”

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“…The latter is modeled at the policy level that allows talking about types and groups as well as commitments. Policies can be formalized in analogy to contracts as a group of intentional resources obeying the duality principle: resources that the agent gives in versus what he aims to achieve [27]. On the event dimension, constraints are what the agent gives in (directives that limit the actions of the controlled system, e.g.…”

“…The next step is self-adaptation. According to [27] a self-adaptive management service should be built as a rulebased system, where rules do not only specify under which conditions which adaptations have to be made, but also the assumptions behind the rule. The assumptions are continuously checked by a special management subservice, typically using external sources, e.g.…”