Adaptive web processes in a pervasive services oriented environment

Services Oriented Architecture provides different applications to interact in a distributed environment to perform a particular task. The concept of services orientation in software design aimed to achieve the loose coupling of applications from its underlying operating environment. Being a progression of component based software development, Services oriented computing provide interfaces to users (human or software) to utilize a particular resource in a distributed environment.
On the other hand the image of traditional computer is fading away. Mobile /embedded devices claim for a good portion of computing efforts today, with the advancement of electronic technologies. Our car, phone, watch or what ever a device that we can’t picture today, has started to or will become a computing device. This resulted in many researches on Pervasive Computing or Ubiquitous Computing.
The operating conditions in such a pervasive services oriented computing environment are always subjected to change. For example while you are travelling, you mobile phone in your pocket and the car you drive might be doing some message exchanges/queries with applications hosted in nearby restaurants, shops and motels. The operating conditions like the mobile coverage, network bandwidth, types of technologies and even the availability of services can be subjected to frequent changes. The life time of applications is determined by these varying factors of the environment. The survival is always critical. And this calls for self-adaptive software systems.
Studies about adaptable and adaptive software systems have emerged as a major research topic in the past few years. Survival in highly fluctuating environments is a critical requirement for future software systems. Concepts of self-healing, self-configuration, self-optimization and all other self-* buzzwords are popping up in pervasive services oriented software systems. Many frameworks, solutions, techniques are being introduced in the reason past.
It is interesting to study about how business processes adapts to these highly fluctuating environments. Current approaches like BPEL and WS-CDL does not address the adaptation. Although it is possible to identify sort of programmable adaptation, in above approaches, where pre-defined processes are carrying out according to limited "expected" changes, it is not the sort of adaptation that we would be looking for. It is required to define, change choreographies among different business partners at run time in order to ensure smooth continues business processes. Runtime negotiation and establishment/termination of contracts among participating entities are essential part of the adaptation.
My research would be concentrated finding techniques and designs for process adaptation in such a pervasive, services oriented computing environment. Yeah... A diverted lil bit from security:-). Though this is not a really hot topic, I belive that there are more yet to be investigated. Therefore in coming months I'd be concentrating on this.