SeCSE - Service Centric Systems Engineering

Creating methods and tools for system integrators and service providers that support cost-effective development and use of dependable services

The SeCSE project helped to solve the issues and requirements of enabling businesses to move to a truly electronic service-based infrastructure using Web services. SeCSE combined large partners from the telecommunications (Telefonica, Telecom Italia) and automotive (DaimlerChrysler, FIAT) industries across Europe, as well as leading academic institutions and software companies.

As Web services gain popularity and mature, there has been a lot of interest and support from different industries in using these open and standardized methods to communicate with their suppliers and customers. However, for business-critical services, there are still service infrastructure requirements for description, monitoring, management, and service level that are unmet today with Web services.

SeCSE answered the questions:

• What needs to be included in a Web service description for software to be able to find and bind to services automatically?
• How can we communicate and monitor service levels for businesses that are using external services for business critical functions?
• What is the best way to use Web services to improve the speed of development and innovation and reduce time to market while still maintaining industry practices and quality levels?

SeCSE turned to the most successful and longest running electronic service industry (telecommunications), as well as the automotive industry, which had a very strong reliability aspect. Both of these industries have a high level of complexity in their services and long established practices and procedures to ensure reliability.

The contribution of the European Microsoft Innovation Center (EMIC):

In the first period of the project, the European Microsoft Innovation Center (EMIC) created a prototype of an XML-based service level language that described the business aspects and requirements from a Web service and monitored technology to identify and evaluate any problems.

Our involvement in the project was specifically focusing on service descriptions and ways to represent and automatically monitor service level agreements (or any other contracts that exist between services). Every business and industry represents service level and business requirements differently, which makes creating a language that represents everybody’s needs quite difficult.

One of the key challenges was designing a language that can represent service level agreement and electronic contract across a wide variety of service types.

Most important for us was how we could simplify the process of running and consuming commercial services for our customers.

We wanted to move away from the large amount of custom code and custom configuration required to run a commercial service today to enabling our customers to install our products and simply describe their requirements.

For more information, visit the project’s Web site at:
http://secse.eng.it