Architecture-Driven Service Discovery for Service Centric Systems

Service discovery has been recognised as an important aspect in the development of service centric systems, i.e., software systems which deploy web services. To develop such systems, it is necessary to identify services that can be combined in order to fulfill the functionality and achieve quality criteria of the system being developed. In this paper, we present a framework supporting architecture-driven service discovery (ASD) − that is the discovery of services that can provide functionalities and satisfy properties and constraints of systems as specified during the design phase of the development lifecycle based on detailed system design models. Our framework assumes an iterative design process and allows for the (re-)formulation of design models of service-centric systems based on the discovered services. The framework is composed of a query extractor, which derives queries from behavioural and structural UML design models of service centric systems, and a query execution engine that executes these queries against service registries based on graph matching techniques. The paper describes a prototype tool that we have developed to demonstrate and evaluate our framework and the results of a set of preliminary experiments that we have conducted to evaluate it.