Self-configuring cloud application mashup with goals and capabilities

Cloud mashup is a technique for the seamless composition of SaaS applications from several sources into a single integrated solution. This paper presents a general approach for automatically composing applications and services deployed over the Cloud. The proposed approach implies to encapsulate distributed processes into smart and autonomic entities, namely cloud capabilities. Despite the lack of a central mashup server, these processes are able to autonomously organize in order to establish different ways to address the desired result. The approach uses a couple of languages for describing respectively the mashup logic in terms of goals and the available functionalities in terms of capabilities. The explicit decoupling between user’s goals and capabilities provides the system the freedom to generate the orchestration plan at run-time, according to the contextual state. An industrial case study, conducted in for a scientific project, has provided the conditions for evaluating the running example of a B2B business process for a fashion enterprise.