Using Model Customization for Variability Management in Service Compositions

Service oriented architecture (SOA) is currently supported by an infrastructure that facilitates model driven development, but reuse issues have received less attention. A key problem in reuse is variability management: how to support the specification and usage of the variation points of the system. In this paper, we propose an approach for model-level variability management, assuming UML activity diagrams as the notation for service composition models in SOA. The approach is based on specifying variation points using so-called specialization patterns, which have been originally developed to support task-driven specialization of application frameworks. We demonstrate the approach with a prototype tool and an example. The approach leads to a guided model customization process focusing on the variation points, making it easy to produce a variant of a basic model.