A formal approach to devising a practical method for modeling reusable services

Abstract

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an effective approach to developing applications by utilizing reusable services. Service providers publish reusable services and service consumers reuse appropriate services for their applications. Services with high reusability would yield high applicability and high returns on investment. Hence, reusability is considered as a key quality attribute for services [1], and designing such reusable services is an essential design goal in SOA. Early approaches to service-oriented analysis and design consider the essence of service reusability, but do not provide effective methodological supports for reuse engineering. Moreover, their methods are not treated formally, leaving a room for ambiguity and incompleteness. Therefore, there is a great demand for methods to identify and design reusable services in a formal but practical manner. In this paper, we propose a systematic process for identifying and designing reusable services. The process consists of five activities and each activity is given a formal treatment and practical instructions. To show the applicability of our approach, we demonstrate the result of our case study for the domain of Flight Ticket Management Services. copy; 2008 IEEE.