A-MUSE: Architectural Modeling for Service Enabling in Freeband

According to the Freeband vision, we are at the edge of a paradigm shift, which will move the centre of information and communication control away from the providers to the individual end-users. A world is envisioned in which people have access to a plethora of application services, at any time and at any place. Moreover, these services will adapt transparently to the capabilities of the communication infrastructure and application devices, and to the users’ personal preferences and needs. In this vision, not only traditional service providers, but almost anyone will be able to develop, deploy and provide services.  

To realise the Freeband vision, an advanced methodology, comprising architectures, methods, techniques and tools, is necessary to facilitate the development and provisioning of the services of the future. The goal of the A-MUSE project is to develop this methodology, by systematizing and optimizing the design process while explicitly addressing features like mobility, pro-activeness, context-awareness and personalization. A distinction is made between complex infrastructural or third-party services, such as typically offered by traditional providers, and personalized services that are composed from available services through the definition of relatively simple context conditions and service flows. The A-MUSE project explicitly aims at also supporting the latter, enabling service design and provisioning by end-users, in much the same way as they are currently able to design web pages.

The project combines and specialises a number of developments that can contribute to this goal: model-driven design, as a way to raise the level of abstraction at which services are specified; service-oriented computing as a new paradigm for distributed computing; and semantic services as a solution for making service provisioning more ‘intelligent’. These developments have recently drawn substantial research interest, including from the A-MUSE consortium partners, and produce an impact on current standardization.

Main results

The main results planned in the project are:

• a conceptual framework with associated formal and best practice techniques that can be used for the design of services;
• techniques for representing semantic descriptions of run-time resources and information, such as user context, service capabilities, user profiles and provider profiles;
• a service design and service architecture definition methodology;
• an integrated software tool to support design operations and analysis of design results (both behaviour models and semantic descriptions);
• case studies in which the above mentioned results are applied and evaluated, in cooperation with other projects within the Freeband Communication programme.