PerQAS Project: PerQAS Project on Software Engineering for Composition and Delivery of Networked Services

Engineering Methods and Infrastructure for Pervasive,
Quality-Assured Composition and Delivery of Web & Ambient Services

Project Outline

Recently, there has been considerable focus on the idea of service-oriented computing, where services are composed by integrating distributed services that encapsulate and publish reusable software functions. Today, fundamental problems such as interconnectability have been solved and these services have been gradually introduced, in a closed manner, that is, within organizations such as businesses.

However, before quality-assured inter-organizational service connections with flexibility and dynamism, which service-oriented computing has originally targeted, can be achieved, a number of issues remain. These issues include:

Runtime provider discovery/selection/replacement

Service customization and guarantee through establishment and enforcement/monitoring of e-contracts (agreements, social norms, etc.)

Service behavior adaptability to environmental conditions, user contexts, and/or established contracts.

The most important remaining issue is:

???? How to guarantee quality and requirements, based on concepts such as agreements and policies, at the time of composing and delivering a service by selecting and connecting a diverse group of services.

Lively discussions have been held on this issue but adequate methodologies or tools have not been concretely established.

This issue is also a major obstacle to the emergence of the era of ubiquitous/pervasive computing, which has been a popular topic of late. The vision of ubiquitous/pervasive computing services in which software manages physical devices as services and creates and delivers useful services for users in a timely manner has been widely accepted. For this to be achieved, however, service quality must be guaranteed in a more complex and dynamic environment, including physical limitations and changing conditions.

Our PerQAS project is tackling these research issues for Pervasive, Quality-Assured Service Composition and Delivery. It also aims at providing widely available practical (software) methods, tools, and infrastructures founded on concrete theoretical foundations, especially with Software Engineering approaches. To summarize, our project will encourage composition and delivery of various inter-organizational physical and virtual services, by establishing development methods and tools that provide a scientific grounding for quality and credibility of services.

Major partner organizations and members

National Institute of Informatics : Fuyuki Ishikawa(leader),
The University of Tokyo: Honiden Laboratory
Waseda University: Fukazawa Laboratory

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