The Design of an Accountability Framework for Service Engineering

The goal of our service science and engineering research is to advance IT-based services technology for service innovation, composition and delivery. In this project, we study the service accountability framework to detect, diagnose, and defuse the real problem in a service process. This is important when a service process has external service providers. We need an efficient mechanism to ensure that external services do provide an acceptable level of performance and stability, in order to meet the overall quality of service (QoS). Our design adopts Bayesian networks to look for the most likely causes in a service process and inspects those services individually to identify the problem. We implement the LLAMA accountability service bus, a dynamic and efficient service infrastructure to support the monitoring, analysis, and reconfiguration of service processes. It includes accountability agents to continuously monitor services and an accountability authority to identify faulty ones.