On the stepwise and disciplined engineering of adaptive service-oriented applications

Service technology geared by its SOA architecture and enabling Web-Services is rapidly gaining in maturity and acceptance. Consequently, most of world-wide (private and corporate) crossorganizations are embracing this paradigm by publishing, requesting and composing their businesses and inherent applications in the form of (web-)services. Nevertheless, to face harsh competitiveness, such service-oriented cross-organizational applications are increasing pressed to be highly composite, adaptive, knowledge-intensive and very reliable. In contrast to that, Web Services standards such as WSDL, BPEL, WS-CDL and many others offer just static, manual and purely process-centric knowledge-scarce ah-doc techniques to deploy such services. Furthermore, current research proposals to leverage such standards towards more correctness and adaptability are still in their infancy stages and do not thus scale up to realistic and wide adoption. Indeed, potential service-oriented applications such as E-commerce, E-Banking and E-health are required to be highly adaptive and dependable, while being mostly governed by volatile rule-centric knowledge. The main aim of this thesis consists therefore in leveraging the development of service-oriented applications towards more reliability, dynamic adaptability and knowledge-intensiveness. After a throughout study and critical analysis of the current state-of-art, this thesis puts forwards an innovative stepwise and disciplined approach towards engineering and deploying dynamically adaptive rule-centric service-oriented applications. More specifically, the approach starts by intuitively eliciting structural service features through stereotyped service-based UML-class diagrams.