Designing adaptive services: The case of energy efficiency

Summary form only given. The advent of Web services, new network technologies, and new devices gives new opportunities and imposes new requirements for the design and the execution of adaptable information system. Processes can be composed using Web services, but their orchestration has to also consider users needs at runtime, where these needs are expressed as context information. Context information is formed by functional and not functional characteristics and Web services must be selected also considering non functional aspects. In this scenario, new approaches and new frameworks have to be studied in order to overcome the limitations of the current standards, such as WSDL and WS-BPEL, which only consider functional aspects of Web services. Adaptive information systems based on web services allows to select web services based on functional characteristics and QoS, to execute a context aware orchestration of processes composed of Web services. Considering the ever increasing of information technology usage in our everyday life and the huge concentration of computational resources at remote service centers, energy costs become one of the biggest challenging issues for IT managers. Mechanisms to improve energy efficiency in service centers are divided at different levels which range from single components to the whole facility, considering both equipment and application issues.