Supporting Service Design Decisions

In the context of service-oriented architectures, services are expected to fulfill certain service characteristics, such as loose coupling or high autonomy. When designing new services, several decisions have to be made, such as how to group capabilities into services, that influence these characteristics. Existing development processes focus on the description of necessary steps to create services and do not explicitly describe detailed design decisions and their impact on the service characteristics. In this paper, an approach is introduced to determine this impact in order to support the design decisions. The approach is applied to design services of a service-oriented surveillance system with comprehensible service characteristics.