Behavioural specification of grid services with the KAoS policy language

Complex services in service-oriented architectures such as the grid typically require to be configured in multiple ways that cannot be anticipated by service designers; we illustrate this requirement by studying the myGrid registry, a grid registry capable of supporting annotations of service descriptions by third-party users. Instead, services have to be conceived so that they can be configured at deployment and run time. We argue that KAoS is a powerful and flexible language that can help define such configurations. Using our registry case study, we examine the requirements that the definition of such complex configurations brings on policy languages and explain how they can be satisfied. Specifically, we use role-value maps to express constraints between property values; we introduce a notion of PolicySet with associated parameters that support constraints within a well defined scope; finally, we define a notion of context that allows us to refer to property values that were extant in past execution environments. Essentially, these concepts allow us to add constraints to values in policy definitions, to organise policies in coherent and structure blocks, and to refer to the execution history. The paper discusses these concepts and how they are implemented in a binding of the KAoS policy language to the myGrid registry.