Ontology-based user requirements decomposition for component selection for highly available systems

To meet user requirements, Commercial-off-the-Shelf (COTS) component based systems are built by integrating different components potentially provided by different vendors. The gap between the user requirements, related to the overall system, and the available components could be very large. Thus the selection of appropriate components for building the system becomes a difficult task. In this paper, we propose an approach to close this gap in the context of highly available systems to be deployed on a Service Availability Forum (SAForum) compliant middleware. Our approach decomposes the user requirements into lower level requirements, referred to as configuration requirements with the help of an ontology. It is a model based approach, which consists of three metamodels and the necessary transformations including traceability links between user requirements and a solution to facilitate system evolution and maintainability.