A Multi-layer Approach for Customizing Business Services

The reusability of services is a cornerstone of the Service-Oriented Architecture design paradigm as it leads to a reduction in the costs associated with software development, integration and maintenance. However, reusability is difficult to achieve in practice as services are either too generic or overspecified for the tasks they are required to complete. This paper presents our work in defining an approach for achieving service reusability in Service-Based Applications (SBAs) by decomposing the reusability requirements into two layers and then into separate views that allow the customization of business policies, quality of service, tasks and control (i.e., orchestration/choreography) parameters. The objective of defining such an approach is to provide an appropriate solution that will guide the customization of a service’s functional and non-functional properties to allow it to be reused in different business contexts.