The Treasure Map for Rich Services

Large systems-of-systems often service large numbers of stakeholders - more stakeholders often means more concerns, many of which are crosscutting. The rich services architecture is a type of service-oriented architecture (SOA) that allows hierarchical decomposition of a system architecture into separate concerns, thereby capturing different system aspects and their interactions, and accounting for crosscutting concerns concisely and sensibly. By leveraging emerging enterprise service bus technology, rich services enable a simple and direct deployment mapping to a system-of-systems network. This paper describes a development process that leverages rich services and is compatible with agile development methodologies. It encompasses use cases, requirements decomposition, role identification, and service definition to produce a rich services logical architecture that can then be mapped to a virtual network topology, and finally a physical network topology. The process decouples development stages to improve flexibility and productivity of complex projects, promising reduced cost and risk.