UML Profiles for WS-Policy4MASC as Support for Business Value Driven Engineering and Management of Web Services and their Compositions

Abstract

WS-Policy4MASC is an XML language for specification of policies for run-timeWeb service management (monitoring and control) activities executed by the Manageable and Adaptable Services Compositions (MASC) middleware. Among its original contributions are specification of diverse business values (benefits or costs, tangible or intangible, agreed or possible, absolute or relative) and specification of various control strategies maximizing different business values (e.g., only agreed intangible benefits). To facilitate development of Web service systems that can be managed with WS-Policy4MASC and the MASC middleware and to improve alignment between run-time management activities and design-time models, we developed novel UML profiles for WS-Policy4MASC. Their original contributions are in improved support for: a) specification of run-time management activities and business values within design-time models, b) automatic creation of run-time management policies from designtime models, c) feedback of run-time management information values into analysis of design-time models. We validated our solutions on detailed examples.

Models and algorithms for business value-driven adaptation of business processes and software infrastructure

“…A UML profile for annotating business value metrics and business strategies on business models has been developed and published in an international conference [12]. I extended the published work and implemented prototype tools: A prototype extension of Eclipse OMONDO UML plug-in tool with information analogous with WSPolicy4MASC policy assertions.…”

Integration of UML modeling and policy-driven management of Web service systems

“…It can be also used for tracking behavior of currently executing Web services and their compositions at a level of granularity and abstraction that is different from the current management dashboards. Such feedback to annotate UML diagrams was not achieved by past works (including [4]), so it is one of our objectives.…”

“…However, policies, or at least policy templates such as 'activity duration should be less than X hours', are often known during design-time. To enable their design-time specification, we developed UML profiles for WS-Policy4MASC [4]. A UML profile is a set of stereotypes, tagged values, and constraints.…”

“…In [4], we discussed that integration of achievements on bridging the business-technology gap during designtime (VBSE) and run-time (BDIM) would lead to improvement of business-IT alignment across the whole system lifecycle. We pointed out the need for further results on bi-directional transfer of business value metrics and other management information between design-time and run-time artifacts and on using this information in novel closed-control loops.…”

“…While these challenging topics are relevant for all IT systems, they are particularly important for modern software systems that can be automatically created or modified during run-time, such as Web service compositions. Therefore, in [4] we also presented UML profiles for WSPolicy4MASC, a policy language [5,6] for management of Web service compositions that is used in the Manageable and Adaptable Service Compositions (MASC) middleware [7].…”