Service-centric systems engineering, and in particular systems development with web services, presents new challenges for requirements processes, techniques and tools. This paper reports a new requirements process that has been developed within the SeCSE consortium to address these challenges. It describes the distinguishing characteristics of the process, and demonstrates them with an example from web services development in the automotive domain. The paper ends with a review of related requirements work and describes future work in SeCSE.

When building a service-oriented system, a service integrator retrieves a set of potentially useful services from registries and then inspects their documentation to eventually decide which services to use. This task needs to be supported by proper tools that help service interface/documentation understanding, highlighting the relationships existing between the retrieved services.
This paper proposes an approach, based on Formal Concept Analysis, to understand relationships between services, as well as between operations of a complex service, by analysing service interfaces and documentation. The approach allows to cluster similar services, highlights hierarchical relationships and, in general, commonalities and differences between services. To support the proposed approach, we developed a tool that provides several service browsing capabilities. Finally, the approach has been evaluated with different case studies built upon real sets of services.

An important aspect of service-centric systems (i.e. systems composed of services) is the ability to support service discovery at run-time in order to cope with unavailable or malfunctioning services. In this paper we present a framework that supports run-time service discovery. The central characteristic of this framework is the combination of components for monitoring the compliance of service-centric systems with requirements at run-time and components for discovering services at run-time. The framework uses the former components to detect violations of requirements at run-time and uses the specifications of the violated requirements to generate queries for discovering services that could substitute for malfunctioning services. It also uses queries derived from the process specification for service discovery. These queries incorporate both structural and behavioural aspects of the required services.

Service-centric systems engineering, and in particular systems development with web services, presents new challenges for requirements processes, techniques and tools. This paper reports the application of patterns as part of a new requirements-based service discovery approach from the SeCSE consortium to address these challenges. It describes how patterns will enhance the service discovery algorithm based on a pattern catalogue that is currently being populated, then demonstrates these enhancements with an example from web services development in the automotive domain, The paper ends with a description of future patterns-relates work in SeCSE.

In this paper we argue that processes, techniques and tools for service-centric systems engineering need to be integrated into existing development methods to ensure their uptake and use. This paper reports a new service discovery tool designed to integrate with the Rational Unified Process and UML and offer seamless generation of service queries from requirements specifications. It describes tool features that overcome research challenges for seamless integration. It demonstrates these features from an example of a real-world, service-based automotive application.