Extending Feature Models with Deep Instantiation to Manage Complexity and Dynamism of Services

To better manage complexity and dynamism of services, the paper proposes an approach based on orthogonal linguistic and ontological classifications used in multilevel language engineering. As the main linguistic concept the approach employs feature model, whilst ontological classifications are drawn up from ITIL service life cycle phases. Specifications of services are expressed by feature models, which are extended with deep instantiation to enable specification of service features spanning across multiple ontological levels. The proposed multilevel ontological service architecture offers a very flexible but powerful solution for dealing with complexity and dynamism in service engineering, which has some distinct advantages over other existing approaches.