Hierarchical management of service accountability in service oriented architectures

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) provides a powerful and flexible paradigm to compose dynamic service processes using individual atomic services. However, these service processes can become vastly complex, involving many service partners, thereby giving rise to difficulties in terms of runtime problem detection and determination. In this research, we propose hierarchical service accountability management, an efficient and effective mechanism to detect service delivery failures and pinpoint the service(s) responsible for failures. We design the hierarchical system architecture of the accountability management model that leverages Bayesian Network reasoning engine to identify the most likely problematic services in a process and selectively inspect those services. Hierarchical accountability management benefits SOA in terms of significant monitoring and diagnosis resource saving and fast recovery during the run-time execution of service processes.