Unleashing the power of policies for service-oriented computing

Policies have the potential of playing a key role in Service Oriented Computing (SOC) providing many useful features for service creation, execution and management. However, so far the Policy-Based Management area has had a limited adoption and the result is that its advocated benefits still remain unproven in a broader sense. In this paper we show that the integration of policies with services using the Service Refinement Cycle can unleash their power of providing higher levels of adaptation to changing environment conditions and system requirements. We present different uses of policies for SOC and an example scenario.