Self-optimization of secure web services

Service-oriented architectures (SOA) and, in particular, web services technologies are widely adopted for the development of interoperable systems. In a dynamic scenario, a composed service may exploit component services in order to complete its task; composed services are variously distributed, and offered by different providers in different security domains and under different load conditions. So, the development of services and their integration entails a huge number of design choices. Obtaining optimality for all of the involved parameters for composed services is a challenging and open issue. In this paper we present MAWeS, an autonomic framework that makes it possible to auto-configure and to auto-tune the composition of services, guaranteeing optimal performance and the fulfillment of given security requirements. We will illustrate the framework architecture and how it is able to support the development of self-optimizing autonomic services on the basis of two evaluation services, the first one able to predict the performance of different services execution, the second one able to evaluate the security level provided by a service. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.