SOC Research Area:
Complex Service Planning and Dynamic Composition

To provide efficient and effective solutions to the planning and composition of services on-the-fly and to the optimisation of service compositions in terms of critical factors such as QoS, reliability, performance and security.

 

Background

SOC provides a new paradigm that has emerged in response to the new way that organisations conduct their businesses via a loosely coupled integration model in the form of services. The composition of independently developed services on-the-fly is critical to the effective use of SOC technologies to satisfy changing business requirements. In particular it requires new solutions for optimal decomposition of the overall functional and non-functional requirements, identification of the required service types, discovery and matchmaking of available services, dynamic planning of their compositions, and on-the-fly orchestration and adaptation in response to changes in the requirements and service environments.

 

Research Issues/Capabilities

The research into Complex Service Planning and Dynamic Composition addresses several key challenges of Service-Oriented Computing, including:

	Transactional support for service choreography and orchestration
	Requirement decomposition and service identification
	Service discovery and matchmaking
	Composition planning and orchestration
	Composition choreography and adaptation
	Composition styles, patterns and architectures

 

The research is conducted by a team of internationally renowned researchers and postgraduate research students contributing expertise in a number of areas, including workflow management, web service transactions, system architectures, adaptive system organisations, web/grid service engineering, and complex systems, from six closely related research programs:

	Web and Data Engineering led by A/Prof. Chengfei Liu
	Workflow Technology led by Prof. Yun Yang
	Component Software and Enterprise Systems led by Prof. Jun Han
	Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Systems led by Prof. Ryszard Kowalczyk
	Complex Intelligent Systems led by Prof. Tim Hendtlass
	Information Systems led by A/Prof. Judy McKay

 

 

Selected R&D projects

The research into Complex Service Planning and Dynamic Composition is carried out in a number of R&D projects in collaboration with external partners, including:

	Internet-Based e-Business Ventures in collaboration with ITSC-AP, Altria
	Towards a Framework for Supporting Consistent and Reliable Collaborative Business Transactions funded by ARC
	Adaptive Service Agreement and Process Management in Services Grids in collaboration with DSTO, EIN and Telstra
	Adaptive Services Grid in collaboration with the EU Consortium of 21 research and industry partners
	Smart Information Environments in collaboration with DSTO
	Enterprise System Integration and Evolution in collaboration with DSTO

 

Other research projects carried out by research staff and postgraduates include:

	Supporting Business Processes with Peer-to-Peer Based Decentralised Workflow
	Adaptive Control of QoS in Open Service Environments
	Adaptive Management of Grid Services with Software Agents
	Agent-Mediated Workflow Management in Virtual Enterprises
	System Architecture Design and Evolution
	A Design Methodology for Adaptive System Organisations