Management concerns in service-driven applications

With the abundance of functionally-similar Web-Services, the offered or agreed-on qualities are becoming decisive factors in attracting private as well as corporate customers to a given service, among all others. Nevertheless, the state-of-art in handling qualities, in this emerging service paradigm, remains largely bound to the aspects of technology and their standards (e.g. time-response, availability, throughputs). However, current approaches still ignore capital domain-based business qualities and management concerns (e.g. customer profiles, business deadlines). The main objective of this thesis is to leverage the handling of quality and management issues in service-driven business applications toward the intuitive business level supported by a precise and flexible conceptualisation. Thus, instead of addressing qualities using just rigid IT-SLA (service-level agreements) as followed by Web Services technology and standards, we propose to cope with more abstract and domain-dependent and adaptive qualities in an intuitive, yet conceptual, manner. The approach is centred on evolving business rules and policies for management, with a clean separation of functionalities as specific rules. At the conceptual level, we propose specialised architectural connectors called management laws that we also separate from coordination laws for functionality issues. We further propose a smooth and compliant mapping of the conceptualisation toward service technology, using existing rule-based standards.