Automating the Management and Versioning of Service Models at Runtime to Support Service Monitoring

In a model-driven service-oriented architecture (SOA), the services are in large parts generated from models. To facilitate monitoring, governance, and self-adaptation the information in these models can be used by services that monitor, manage, or adapt the SOA at runtime. If a service for monitoring, management, or adaptation in an SOA is dependent on models, and the metamodel changes, usually the service needs to be manually adapted to work with the new version, recompiled, and redeployed. This manual effort impedes the use of models at runtime. To address this problem, this paper introduces model-aware services that work with models at runtime. These services are supported using a service environment, called Morse. Hiding the complexity of implicit versioning of models from users while respecting the principle of Universally Unique Identifiers (UUIDs), it realizes a novel transparent UUID-based model versioning technique. It uses the model-driven approach to automatically generate and deploy Morse services that are used by the model-aware services to access models in the correct version. In this way, monitoring and adaptation in SOAs can be better supported, and the manual effort to evolve services for monitoring, management, or adaptation, which are based on models at runtime, can be minimized.