Service chain-based business alliance formation in service-oriented architecture

Businesses in service-oriented architecture (SOA) are usually flexible to be integrated with each other, so that they can discover, select, and compose services to fulfill a given task and goal. However, the number of businesses and services are ever-increasing, and more seriously, they are complexly linked with each other. These problems cause less flexibility of businesses, i.e., low understandability on business services and inefficiency on business integration. Thereby, in this paper, we propose a novel SOA-based platform to discover a service chain where (i) nodes are a set of services provided by businesses, and (ii) arcs indicate successive relationships between the services. We emphasize that we have to take into account not only explicit relationships (e.g., agreement) but also implicit ones by matching semantics of the services. Consequently, people like decision makers can easily figure out which businesses might be chosen in a certain situation. More importantly, business alliance formation process, which sorts out and merge relevant businesses, can be conducted by employing social network analysis (SNA) methods and finding out social relationships (e.g., centrality) between the corresponding services. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.