Autonomic Web Service Platform with Dynamic Multi-Layer Control

The rapid expansion of Web services and broadband network has enabled more and more useful services for the users with different systems at distributed locations to share applications over the network. However, the operation of such services has become more and more difficult in proportion to the complexity of the total system with applications and networks that need to be managed. Therefore, it requires a lot of effort for the operators to manage the total system if some trouble occurred with an application or a network. This paper presents an autonomic Web service platform with the dynamic multi-layer control that can manage both the network layer and the application layer simultaneously to offer the most preferred service for the users under any circumstances. It consists of three major components: 1) environment information database, which stores the status of networks and applications, 2) dynamic control manager, which maintains service policies on both networks and applications, and controls the service delivery based on the service policy that conforms to the current situation, 3) dynamic control agent, which works as a Web service proxy and controls SOAP messages of the applications based on the service policy. The communications and controls of this platform are all Web services based, and therefore, are quite open and applicable to any field of services. The result of an experiment on the disaster information sharing service proved the effectiveness of this Web service platform.