Cross-layer impact analysis and adaptation of hierarchical service-based applications

An essential aspect of business processes executed as service-based systems (SBSs) is conformity to compliance requirements from various sources such as laws, regulations and service-level agreements. Categories of compliance requirements may be classified into temporal, data, resource and control-flow. Noncompliance to requirements of any category may lead to loss of reputation and huge compensations. Hence, the SBS has to instantaneously adapt in order to mitigate the effect of such violations. This study investigates the intra-layer impact of a violation of a service on related entities in the service layer and the inter-layer inconsistencies caused in the business and infrastructure layer at a particular vantage point. We provide a proactive as well as reactive adaptation mechanism based on the type of fault occurred. After quantification of impacted region in the service layer and its ripple effect on the business process layer, we adapt by localizing the replacement of services to the impacted region. Existing studies on adaptation try to adapt or recover faults from any one of the categories only. Our cross-layer approach tries to overcome faults of the data, temporal, control-flow and resource category and has the advantage of minimal number of services replaced with reduced recovery time by invoking proactive adaptation measures at selected vantage point.