Using Automated Policy Refinement to Manage Adaptive Composite Services

Ubiquitous computing environments demands applications and services to be dynamic and adaptable. Web services have provided adaptivity through composition. However, with the increase demand to cope with changing environments, there is a need for a more intelligent type of service - adaptive web service. In this paper we concentrate on policy based management of web services, where the web services have adaptive behaviors. The paper proposes the design, implementation and evaluation of a suite of policy development tools which (i) facilitate the specification of adaptive web services (which are to be managed by a policy based system) using finite state machines to describe the permitted adaptive behaviors, (ii) supports the specification of supportable (functionally correct) high level management policies, the automated refinement of these high level policies and the auto-generation of enforceable (low level) policies. The paper also presents a methodology and an evaluation to the approach. The paper also provides a brief presentation of related research in policy refinement and distinguishes the proposed approach from published work.