A Service Network Architecture for a Multi-Vehicle Search Mission

Multi-vehicle applications rely on the dynamic allocation of resources, and must exhibit robustness to failures or to service degradation in general. We present a model for such applications, called the service network model. The entities of this model are services and service providers. Services are defined by standard names and interfaces, and are described by attributes. Service providers export services with certain quality of service guarantees. They may also need to import services from other providers. An application is modeled as a directed graph, where nodes represent service providers and edges represent services imported by the source node and exported by the destination node. The problem is then to build such application graphs dynamically. We provide a middleware and an algorithm that solves the above problem. Functions of the middleware include publishing, finding and using service providers, as well as completing an incomplete application graph with the missing services. We illustrate our approach with a case study involving a multi-vehicle search mission.