INDENICA - Engineering Virtual Domain-Specific Service Platforms

Service-oriented computing has attracted significant attention over recent years. While this innovative approach provides enormous potential for software development in an open, networked environment, the very different constraints and quality concerns in different domains have so far led to a heterogeneous landscape of service platforms.While a single integrated platform would be highly desirable, the domain-specific constraints in areas like factory automation, business information systems or telecommunication are much too diverse, leading to the need for specialized, domain-specific service platforms. Already now a plethora of different service platforms are available. This fragmentation, however, effectively slows the emergence of a full service ecosystem. In order to fulfill the vision of an integrated platform ecosystem, the various platforms must be made interoperable.
The INDENICA project will address these challenges in an explicit and integrated way. It will provide a development method, infrastructure components and tools that support the efficient derivation of specialized, domain-specific service platforms. By deriving these platforms from common infrastructures, we will combine optimal adaptation of the service platform to domain-specific constraints with easy and fast development. At the same time, the resulting platforms will be interoperable by design. This allows integrating arbitrary INDENICA service platforms at any time into a virtual domain-specific service platform. The integrated platforms will act from an application point of view as a single platform, enabling transparent multi-platform deployment and comprehensive QoS management. On the technical side INDENICA will use Product Line Techniques (compositional and generative techniques) to provide an efficient approach for the derivation of the domain-specific platforms.
INDENICA results will be systematically validated using an integrated multi-domain use case. This use case integrates components from the relevant areas of the industrial partners and provides a demonstration for the strong integration capabilities of INDENICA platforms.