P. van Eck, J. Gordijn, and R. Wieringa (Eds.): CAiSE 2009, LNCS 5565, pp. 11–16, 2009. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009 Towards the Next Generation of Service-Based Systems: The S-Cube Research Framework * Andreas Metzger and Klaus Pohl Software Systems Engineering, University of Duisburg-Essen 45117 Essen, Germany {andreas.metzger,klaus.pohl}@sse.uni-due.de Abstract. Research challenges for the next generation of service-based systems often cut across the functional layers of the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Providing solutions to those challenges requires coordinated research efforts from various disciplines, including service engineering, service compo- sition, software engineering, business process management, and service infra- structure. The FP7 Network of Excellence on Software Services and Systems (S-Cube) performs cross-discipline research to develop solutions for those chal- lenges. Research in S-Cube is organised around the S-Cube research frame- work, which we briefly introduce in this paper. Moreover, we outline the envisioned types of interactions between the key elements of the S-Cube re- search framework, which facilitate the specification and design as well as the operation and adaptation of future service-based systems. Keywords: Service-based Systems, Service Oriented Architecture, Service Engineering, Software Services. 1 Motivation Service-orientation is increasingly adopted as a paradigm for building highly dy- namic, distributed and adaptive software systems, called service-based systems. A service-based system is realized by composing software services. For the service composer, a software service is not an individual piece of software. Rather, it repre- sents some functionality that can be invoked through the service’s interface, where the actual software that implements this functionality is executed, maintained and owned by the provider of that service [1]. Currently, the common practice for developing service-based systems is to employ the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm, which distinguishes between three functional layers [2][3][4]: The service infrastructure layer (SI) supports de- scribing, publishing and discovering services and provides the run-time environment for the execution of service-based systems. It provides primitives for service commu- nication, facilities for service description, as well as capabilities for service discovery. * The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013 under grant agreement 215483 (S-Cube). For further information please visit http://www.s-cube-network.eu/