Towards self-organizing service oriented architecture

Development of internet and World Wide Web technologies has enabled access to many types of services over the web. Large and complex computational units can be built / composed out of the available services. This type of concept and architecture is called Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Implementation of SOA brings about challenges which include service discovery, service interaction, service composition, robustness, quality of service, security, etc. These challenges are mainly due to the dynamic nature of SOA. SOA may often need to dynamically (re)-organize its topologies of interactions between the services due to unpredictable events, such as crashes or network problems, which will cause services unavailability. The dynamic characteristic of SOA is quite similar with the characteristic of self-organizing systems, in the way that they are able to organize elements (services in the case of SOA) in order to change their functions or create new functions on higher levels (emergence). Therefore, we believe that the dynamic characteristic of SOA can benefit from the use of self-organization primitives found in nature. In this paper, we elaborate the idea of adapting self-organizing systems found in nature into SOA in order to ensure the robustness of SOA, and the proposed architecture is presented. © 2009 IEEE.