Soft Constraints for Quality Aspects in Service Oriented Architectures

TL;DR

This paper introduces a framework using Soft Constraints to model and evaluate quality aspects like cost, performance, and availability in Service Oriented Architectures, enabling better QoS management.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach applying Soft Constraints to model service components and their interactions, incorporating QoS measures directly into the architecture.

Findings

Framework effectively models QoS attributes

Constraint aggregation computes overall service quality

Supports flexible, quantitative QoS evaluation

Abstract

We propose the use of Soft Constraints as a natural way to model Service Oriented Architecture. In the framework, constraints are used to model components and connectors and constraint aggregation is used to represent their interactions. The "quality of a service" is measured and considered when performing queries to service providers. Some examples consist in the levels of cost, performance and availability required by clients. In our framework, the QoS scores are represented by the softness level of the constraint and the measure of complex (web) services is computed by combining the levels of the components.