WSDarwin: A Framework for the Support of Web Service Evolution

Service-oriented architectures have emerged as a popular development paradigm for modular, extendible distributed systems, relying on interoperable components. However, their evolution is a challenging problem, due to the fact that their constituent parts typically reside outside a single entity's domain of ownership and control. In my thesis, I have developed WSDarwin, a framework to support the evolution of service systems. WSDarwin posits a novel conceptual model of the technical and economic relationships between service providers and clients, based on which, a game-theoretic method determines the best evolution decision for them as distinct economic players and for the ecosystem as a whole. Furthermore, WSDarwin provides a complete toolkit for client adaptation (including service-interface differencing, client-proxy adaptation and client unit testing), to simplify the client's software evolution task in response to service changes.