A novel service evolution approach for active services in ubiquitous computing

With the emergence of more and more personalized service requirements, service customization has become a compelling problem in ubiquitous computing. As a new paradigm for service customization, the Active Services reuses existing services and obtains the user-needed service evolved from them. In this paper, a novel service reuse approach is proposed for service evolution process in the active services paradigm. Besides the entire service reuse realized in existing works, our approach can also achieve partial reuse of existing services at functionality level. To generate a user-needed service, the reusable parts of each existing service are extracted with an index strategy and utilized directly, and then the missing functionalities to satisfy the service requirement are further implemented. As quality of service (QoS) is very important for ubiquitous services, in this paper, based on the general service evolution process, two types of QoS-aware service reuse methods are also introduced. The proposed methods have been implemented and extensive experiments were done to evaluate them. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our methods in several measurements of service reuse: computation cost, success rate, and the quality of generated services. Copyright (C) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.