Towards dependable service-orientated computing systems

Service-orienting computing systems refer to computing and information systems that are developed in service-oriented architecture, service-oriented computing paradigm, and service-oriented development lifecycle. The development of service-oriented computing systems is completing the first decade in its lifespan. Service-oriented computing systems started with the concept of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). As distributed architecture, SOA considers a software system consisting of a collection of loosely coupled services that communicate with each other through standard interfaces and protocols. These services are platform-independent. They can be published in public or private directories or repositories for software developers to reuse and to compose their applications. As software architecture, SOA is a conceptual model that concerns the organization and interfacing among the software components (services). It does not concern the development of operational software. The definitions of the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) in 2000, the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) in 2001, and the Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI) in 2002 established the foundation of Web Services (WS) and WS-based architecture, which gave SOA a live instance and paved it road to the success. The next step of the development is the formation of Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) paradigm. SOC paradigm is based on the SOA conceptual model. However, it goes a step further to include not only the concepts and principles, but also the methods, algorithms, coding, and evaluation considerations, which are a large part of the software development process. As shown in Fig. 1, layers of technologies have been developed for supporting SOC system development, includes