15 January 2008

Congratulations to Ronan Barrett who successfully defended his thesis and will be awarded the degree of PhD.

The title of Ronan's thesis is "Investigations into the Model Driven Design of Distribution Patterns for Web Service Compositions".

He completed his PhD in the Software and Systems Engineering group,  School of Computing, DCU under the supervision of Dr. Claus Pahl.

Ronan is now working for Ericsson as a Researcher in the Ericsson Ireland Research Centre (EiRC). His work there explores different distributed network management architectures, specifically in a broadband access network context.

Brief description of Project:

Increasingly, distributed systems are being used to provide enterprise level solutions with high scalability and fault tolerance. These solutions are often built using Web services that are composed to perform useful business functions. Acceptance of these composed systems is often constrained by a number of non-functional properties of the system such as availability, scalability and performance. There are a number of distribution patterns that each exhibit different non-functional characteristics. These patterns are re-occurring distribution schemes that express how a system is to be assembled and subsequently deployed. Traditional approaches to development of Web service compositions exhibit a number of issues. Firstly, Web service composition development is often ad-hoc and requires considerable low level coding effort for realisation. Such systems often exhibit fixed architectures, making maintenance difficult and error prone. Additionally, a number of the non-functional requirements cannot be easily assessed by examining low level code. In this thesis we explicitly model the compositional aspects of Web service compositions using UML Activity diagrams. This approach uses a modeling and transformation framework, based on Model Driven Software Development (MDSD), going from high level models to an executable system. The framework is guided by a methodological framework whose primary artifact is a distribution pattern model, chosen from the supplied catalog.

Our modeling and transformation framework improves the development process of Web service compositions, with respect to a number of criteria, when compared to the traditional handcrafted approach. Specifically, we negate the coding effort traditionally associated with Web service composition development. Maintenance overheads of the solution are also significantly reduced, while improved mutability is achieved through a flexible architecture when compared with existing tools. We also improve the product output from the development process by exposing the non-functional runtime properties of Web service compositions using distribution patterns.

This project was generously funded by the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology (IRCSET).

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