SOC Research Area:
Service Engineering and Validation

To provide engineering and validation support to ensure that services and service compositions meet their functional, quality and operational requirements.

 

Background

As individual services are usually developed and owned by different parties, their use by others relies on their published functional, quality and operational descriptions. To ensure that the end systems assembled from these services perform as expected, it is essential to ascertain that the individual services are properly developed to satisfy the claims made in their descriptions. For a service-based system, it is also critical to validate that the services involved can interact as expected and the overall system delivers the expected results and qualities. In particular, this needs to be carried out dynamically at system run-time, where existing services may leave the system, new services may join the system and yet the system continues to deliver its capabilities.

 

Research Issues/Capabilities

The research into Service Engineering and Validation investigates a number of key issues in assuring the quality of services and service-based systems, including:

	Analysis techniques for service functionality, quality and operational properties
	Monitoring and validation of service interactions against service descriptions
	Test case generation based on service descriptions
	Composition architecture-driven test case generation
	Dynamic interrogation and validation of services
	Automatic analysis of system-wide properties (functionality, viability and qualities)
	Run-time monitoring and handling of service and system qualities and exceptions
	Management of service and system evolution

 

The research is conducted by a team of internationally renowned researchers and postgraduate research students contributing expertise in a number of areas including software analysis, software testing, workflow technology, intelligent agents and complex systems from sic closely related research programs:

	Component Software and Enterprise Systems led by Prof. Jun Han
	Workflow Technology led by Prof. Yun Yang
	Web and Data Engineering led by A/Prof. Chengfei Liu
	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 Service Engineering and Validation is carried out in a number of R&D projects in collaboration with external partners, including:

	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
	Enterprise System Integration and Evolution in collaboration with DSTO

 

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

	Monitoring and Validation of Service Interactions
	Analysis and Evaluation of Service and System Security Properties
	Analysis and Evaluation of Service and System Performance Properties
	Dynamic Service Updates and System Evolution
	Exception Handling for Service Based Systems