An Extended Service Oriented Architecture forWebServices Adoption through Economic Incentives

This paper proposes and researches mechanisms which on the one hand support and stimulate the large scale adoption of Web services as a means for publishing software components, and on the other hand enable the dynamic creation and execution of Internet-scale distributed software systems built on top of this Web services environment. The proposed solution is to extend the service-oriented architecture (SoA) design pattern by adding a transparent middleware layer that restricts and controls the access of the applications to the needed Web services by means of requiring successful participation in auctions associated with those Web services. This proposal has several benefits: an efficient pricing mechanism for digital services, the introduction of incentives that would drive the development and offering of Web services, and a healthy, supply-demand based mechanism that enables the evolution both of the published Web services and of the systems built on these services. Finally, systems built on our extended architecture are capable of autonomously evolving in terms of choice of the needed services and function efficiently in terms of costs associated with their execution. The current paper uncovers this new research field and focuses on the rationale for our extension, the research problems generated by it; it also describes the middleware supporting the auction mechanisms, and looks into initial practical considerations of auctions mechanisms for Web services and strategies for building auction-enhanced SoA systems