A Conceptual Model for Business-Oriented Management of Web Services

Abstract

Web services have been developed in recent years as a fundamental technique for the new generation of business-to-business (B2B) or enterprise application integration (EAI) applications. As perceived, the current development research about them is focusing on their underlying infrastructures such as SOAP, UDDI, WSDL, WSCL, BPEL, BPML, and among others. However, once such technical issues get matured and more Web services become available, the attention will naturally shift from deploying these services to managing them. From the perspective of business management, this means that these services are monitored and controlled for fulfilling business objectives. In this paper, we propose an object- oriented modeling approach that addresses this issue by dividing required mechanisms into three layers: business objective, service agent, and service composition ones. With this architecture, Web services are managed via the recognition of a business objective, the employment of a service agent that arranges a composition of demanded Web services for achieving the objective, and the confirmation of interactions/coordination among these services in achieving the objective. For specification, an object-oriented model is presented for each layer that describes the working detail of that layer. To illustrate, these models are applied in the fulfillment of a business travel plan that involves a set of business objectives to be achieved by various Web services offered by different providers.