Research Problem

The Smart Service Discovery and Composition tool enables the automation of BPaaS allocation which is currently manually performed by the BPaaS broker. The BPaaS broker is currently faced with a two faced problem: (a) how to discover those services which are able to either realise the functionality of the BPaaS workflow service tasks or support the execution of the internal software components of these tasks; (b) how to select the best alternative from the service candidates of each task such that the user requirements at both the global and local level are optimised.

Concerning the first problem, the current state-of-the-art focuses on providing solutions on just one aspect, either the functional or the non-functional one. In many cases, the respective techniques do not exploit the service semantics. In addition, the alignment of QoS terms is usually not considered in non-functional service matchmaking. These two issues lead to low precision and recall in the service discovery process. Moreover, the execution time and the scalability of the respective discovery algorithms are usually not satisfactory due to the non-exploitation of smart techniques which attempt to cleverly organise the service advertisement space.

As far as the second problem is concerned, we need first to explicate that the service selection problem in BPaaS allocation is usually harder with respect to the selection of SaaS or IaaS services. This is due to the fact that both IaaS and SaaS selection are inter-dependent on each other. This means that the selection of an IaaS service can have an effect on the QoS at the SaaS level which can then influence the service selection at this latter level. As such, there is a need for an approach which is able to select both IaaS and SaaS services in conjunction by still taking into account all types of user requirements.

Secondly, by focusing on individual level service selection, the proposed approaches usually exhibit various issues which include the following: (a) the dependencies between the different QoS terms are not considered.

Solution Approach

Architecture

The source code is publicly available at GitLab.

Try out the first version of the prototype by yourself: DMN-to-CAMEL-Mapper service

References

• D3.3 - BPaaS Allocation and Execution Environment Blueprints
• D3.4 - BPaaS Allocation and Execution Environment Prototypes