Real-Time Service-Oriented Distributed Governance

Distributed governance is the process for individual entities in the system to make autonomous decisions in response to special situations. It is an important principle in governing the actions in cyber physical systems to achieve operation responsiveness. In this paper, we extend the widely adopted service-oriented architecture (SOA) paradigm to build a distributed governance model in the context of cyber-physical systems. To achieve distributed governance, we develop the novel distributed workflow model and the autonomous service composition process. Our distributed workflow infrastructure facilitates easy modification and evolution of the workflows and effectively incorporates the distributed service and workflow management mechanism. Our autonomous service composition scheme allows intelligent entities in the cyber physical system to participate in the service composition process and make local composition decisions which collectively, best satisfy the global Quality of Service (QoS) objectives. The distributed workflow and autonomous composition concepts can greatly enhance the timeliness, effectiveness, scalability, and agility of large-scale Cyber Physical Systems (CPS).