Architecture Design for Service Network Deployment, Customization and Execution

Service Network (SN) is a feasible approach to deal with mass personalized customer requirements in a cost-effective way. The SN philosophy has been widely applied in various service domains, such as e-Business, online travel services, bioinformatics, etc. Being a persistent service infrastructure, SN requires a run-time environment which enables its deployment, customization and execution. This paper shows an architecture design for such kind of environment. The conceptual model of SN is firstly introduced, and then the high-level system architecture is put forward, including a deployment engine (SDE), a customization engine (SCE), an execution engine (SEE), and a set of repositories storing necessary data during the lifecycle of an SN. Particularly, three mechanisms facilitating the execution of a customized SN are proposed, i.e., BPEL-based, Rule-based and Event-based ones, and a brief comparison between them is conducted. The proposed architecture enables the deployment and execution of SN across boundaries of different clouds where the constituent services of the SN are deployed and executed.