Title: Pragmatic granularity decision for right-grained services in service-oriented modelling

Authors: Yukyong Kim; Kyung-Goo Doh

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Engineering Hanyang University ERICA Ansan, Gyeonggi 426-791, Korea ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering Hanyang University ERICA Ansan, Gyeonggi 426-791, Korea

Abstract: The identification of right-grained services is important in leading a successful service orientation because it has a direct impact on two major goals: the composability of loosely-coupled services and the reusability of individual services in different contexts. Although the concept of service orientation has been intensely debated in recent years, a unified methodic approach for identifying services has not yet been identified. In this paper, we suggest a formal approach to identify services at the right level of granularity from the business process model abstraction. Our approach adopts the concept of activity allocation based on the locality principle for defining loosely-coupled services. The method utilising the concept of graph partitioning can minimise the network roundtrip costs incurred during the service execution. If we can define activities into a service as cohesively as possible, we can identify the reusable and self-contained services so as to reduce the coupling of remote tasks and increase the local task cohesion.

Keywords: service identification; SOA; service-oriented architecture; metrics-based decision making; business process modelling; granularity; right-grained services; service-oriented modelling; service orientation; reusability; activity allocation; graph partitioning.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWGS.2012.048376

International Journal of Web and Grid Services, 2012 Vol.8 No.2, pp.111 - 133

Received: 15 Nov 2011
Accepted: 31 Jan 2012
Published online: 31 Dec 2014 *

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