Flexible Automatic Service Brokering for SOAs

Enterprises apply SOAs to implement business processes as services which are adaptive to software changes and updates. Service management has to ensure high availability, performance and fault tolerance and is therefore crucial for the undisturbed functionality of a SOA. However, manual service management is cumbersome with a large amount of services and applications. Services that fail or do not achieve a certain quality of service (QoS) need to be manually replaced. Up to now, a fully automatic approach is missing. We introduce a semantic model and architecture for automatic service brokering in service-oriented architectures (SOA). A Service Broker is used for semantic service discovery with respect to functional criteria and QoS. Hence, we use a semantic matching algorithm on an extension of the OWL-S ontology. Services are requested by service containers which monitor and replace services in interaction with the service broker. The architecture is presented with an implementation using Web Services.