Service Composition in Distributed Application Design and Execution

In a collaboration with the Computer Platform Research Center - CIPI (jointly established by the Universities of Genoa and Padua, Italy), researchers are investigating the service composition paradigm for distributed applications. This paradigm can be taken as a reference when a distributed application is treated as a composite service made up of atomic services. In these cases, the application designers do not need to be programmers because they can specify the distributed applications using visual Service Creation Platforms. As for execution, composite services run in software platforms called service execution platforms (SEP), according to the “Platform as a Service” (PaaS) category of cloud computing services, that support Atomic Service interaction as well as composite service deployment, session control, performance management, authentication, authorization, accounting, etc.

This project investigates the application of the service composition paradigm to real application domains. It also studies and characterizes the architecture and operation of service creation/execution platforms.

Two domains are addressed: distributed data analysis, as in Big Data research, and object interaction, as in Internet of Things research. The first domain targets the composition of spreadsheets, i.e., the creation of “composite” spreadsheets obtained through the combination of “atomic” spreadsheets that exchange tables in the “Spreadsheet Space.” The second domains targets the composition of real objects, or things, i.e., the creation of “composite” services obtained through the combination of “atomic” real objects interacting in the Internet of Things.

The activity is promoted by the CIPI, with the support of the European Commission and SpreadSheetSpace Inc.