SOC Research Area:
Rich Service Description and Interoperability

To enable the description of the quality, operational as well as functional characteristics of services so as to achieve better understanding and interoperability for services in the context of composition.

 

Background

Services are software applications that are developed independently, and aimed for integration with other services to form systems and support business activities and transactions within and across organisations. To achieve this, the interacting services in such a composition setting need to “work together” seamlessly. This requires that the services have not only compatible functionalities, but also compatible quality attributes and coherent operation protocols. Security, performance and reliability are just some of the quality aspects for services and service compositions. For an individual service, we need (1) to publish its functionality, quality properties and operation protocols from the service consumer perspective so that its suitability in a service composition can be assessed. For a service composition, we need (2) to analyse the compatibility of the interacting services regarding functionality, qualities and operation protocols.

 

Research Issues/Capabilities

The research addresses a number of key challenges in Rich Service Description and Interoperability, in particular, in service integrity, security, performance and interaction protocols:

	Description and compatibility analysis of service interaction protocols
	Analysis, characterisation and description of service security properties
	Security compatibility analysis for service compositions
	Analysis, characterisation and description of service performance properties
	Performance analysis for service compositions
	Integrity and consistency analysis for service compositions

 

The research is conducted by a team of internationally renowned researchers and postgraduate research students contributing expertise in a range of areas including model development, language design, formal analysis, automated negotiations and software tools, from six closely related research programs:

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

 

 

Selected R&D projects

The research into Rich Service Description and Interoperability is carried out in a number of R&D projects in collaboration with external partners, including:

	Enterprise System Integration and Evolution in collaboration with DSTO
	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
	Services Environment Network for Virtual Organisations in collaboration with EIN
	A Comprehensive Business Transaction Framework for Web Services funded by ARC
	Constraints in XML Schema Integration funded by ARC

 

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

	Compatible and Viable Interactions between Services
	Security Engineering for Services and Service Based systems
	Collective Security Behaviour
	Performance Engineering for Services and Service Based Systems
	Service Selection and Dynamic Update