The world is moving towards the open system science, where, in addition to classical synthesis and analysis, the dimension of management has to be considered. And so it is with services where management plays a critical role. Managing resources, optimizing performance and dependability, as well as minimizing cost, are and will be ongoing challenges for SOA. This is due to open-ended systems, multiple degrees of freedom, growing complexity, frequent configurations and reconfigurations, upgrades, updates, cyber attacks, and new requirements, especially regarding the real time. This volume addresses many of these problems and concerns by offering an entire spectrum of solutions ranging from managing via Service Level Agreements and Service Level Management contracts on the expectations side to real implementations and fault injection for estimating resilience from the engineering perspective. We also can gain an insight into both analysis and synthesis for the all important problem of service composition. Service compositions, if successful, will dramatically change the spectrum of service offering, but to get to this point we need to solve a number of problems, such as: feasibility of compositions, Quality of Service of composed services, overhead of a composition process, automation of composition, and cost of composed service. Many of them are addressed in this volume. Finally, the question of service availability and fault tolerance gains significance in the service environment where proliferation of computer applications to all walks of life and growing expectations by users with regard to reliance will force service providers to search for dependable, fault-tolerant SOAs. Several contributions in this volume offer interesting approaches to these challenges.
– Miroslaw Malek, Humboldt University Berlin, Germany