A modelling approach to service-oriented architecture

In recent years, with the rapid development of web-based technologies, considerable progress has been witnessed in service-oriented enterprise information systems. Currently a critical issue is to specify service-oriented systems for application design. This paper highlights the description problem of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and puts forward a modelling approach as solution. Different from the current SOA specification methods, we do not exclude the traditional software architecture description techniques and present an architecture description language named SO-ADL. Based on the analysis of the requirements for SOA modelling, some similar concepts are introduced as first-class modelling constructs including that of service component and connector, and some composite notions are defined for the architectural re-use as well. Furthermore, a role-driven dynamic mechanism is specified to support dynamic structure description in SOA since it is typical of the highly dynamic nature. Within the context of a travel reservation system application scenario, we demonstrate the usage and practicability of our approach based on web services.