A Development Process for Self-adapting Service Oriented Applications

Software services in the near ubiquitous future will need to cope with variability, as they are deployed on an increasingly large diversity of computing platforms, operate in different execution environments, and communicate through Beyond 3G (B3G) networks. Heterogeneity of the underlying communication and computing infrastructure, physical mobility of platform devices, and continuously evolving requirements claim for services to be adaptable according to the context changes without degrading their quality. Supporting the development and execution of software services in this setting raises numerous challenges that involve languages, methods and tools. However these challenges taken in isolation are not new in the service domain. Integrated solutions to these challenges are the main targets of the IST PLASTIC project. In this paper we introduce the PLASTIC development process model for self-adapting context-aware services, in which we propose model-based solutions to address the main issues of this domain in a comprehensive way. We instantiate the process model by providing methodologies to generate Quality of Service models and adaptable code from UML service models. All these methodologies are supported by an integrated framework which is based on an UML profile that we have defined for the PLASTIC domain.