Management Services – A Framework for Design - Advanced Information Systems Engineering - page 593

PowerSupplyMgt monitors the supply of power to the battery and if it finds out that
the battery strength is not on the required level, charging is executed.
A comparison of our approach with [11] reveals interesting information to the
service designer. The modeling approach in [11] starts from an extended version of
the Tropos [2] goal model. Then independently, it identifies non-intentional entities:
external resources (room, dustbin and battery charger) and internal ones (dust box and
battery). Entities are then related to the goals via the concept of condition ,
corresponding to the extended REA notion of policy constraint.
The management service modeling approach starts with the core services and
identifies internal and some external resources needed or influenced by them. It then
derives management services and management subservices. For example,
PowerSupplyMgt has Monitoring and Charging subservices. The services have
service policies. These include goals, but note that the goals are not defined globally,
as in the previous approach, but per service. In the end, the entities identified are the
same in both approaches, but the service-service and service-resource relationships in
our model are not considered in the [11] approach.
5 Conclusion
In this paper, we have developed a design framework for management services, based
on an established business ontology and applied to two case studies from the literature.
The evaluation suggests that the framework provides useful and specific modeling sup-
port and that it is widely applicable. The theoretical relevance of the paper consists in
the extended REA management ontology, as well as the three management control
cycles that we have distinguished and described in SOA terms and that go beyond cur-
rent work in adaptive systems considering a diagnostic control cycle only. The paper
may also have practical relevance to service engineers interested in aligning business
services and software services and to whom current service design methods do not give
much specific support when it comes to service management design.
Although a design framework is not easy to evaluate in practice, we intend to
strengthen the validation by applying it to real-world cases and extending the compar-
ison with related work in management information systems, software engineering,
multi-agent systems and the field of adaptive systems.
An interesting topic for future research is the design and development of generic
management service software, e.g. to deploy a diagnostic service on the basis of a
policy definition and a given environment (available services) only.
References
[1] Bartels, A.: Smart Computing Drives The New Era of IT Growth. Forrester (2009)
[2] Bresciani, P., Giorgini, P., Giunchiglia, F., Mylopoulos, J., Perini, A.: Tropos: An Agent-
Oriented Software Development Methodology. Proc. AAMAS 8(3), 203-236 (2004)
[3] Cetina, C., Haugen, O., Zhang, X., Fleurey, F., Pelechano, V.: Strategies for Variability
Transformation at Run-time. In: Proc. 13th Int. Software Product Lines Conf., SPLC (2009)
[4] Dobson, S., Sterritt, R., Nixon, P., Hinchey, M.: Fulfilling the Vision of Autonomic
Computing. IEEE Computer 43, 35-41 (2010)