Verifying the Conformance of Web Services to Global Interaction Protocols: A First Step

Abstract

Abstract. Global choreographies define the rules that peers should respect in their interaction, with the aim of guaranteeing interoperability. An abstract choreography can be seen as a protocol specification; it does not refer to specific peers and, especially in an open application domain, it might be necessary to retrieve a set of web services that fit in it. A crucial issue, that is raising attention, is verifying whether the business process of some peers, in particular the parts that encode the communicative behavior, will produce interactions which are conformant to the agreed protocol (legality issue). Such issue is tackled by the so called conformance test, which is a means for certifying the capability of interacting of the involved parts: two peers that are proved conformant to a same protocol will actually interoperate by producing a legal conversation. This work proposes an approach to the verification of a priori conformance of a business process to a protocol, which is based on the theory of formal languages and guarantees the interoperability of peers that are individually proved conformant.

Mining process models with prime invisible tasks

“…For example, in [Baldoni et al 2005b] the authors state that interoperability aims to check if a service, described by its behavioural interface, can play a given role within a choreography. In their approach however, both choreography and behavioural interface are described from a procedural viewpoint, and a complete specification of all the allowed interactions is given.…”

“…They define a notion of interoperability as a set of feature that the resulting transition system should guarantee. Although their idea of interoperability is in some sense "broader" that the one given in [Baldoni et al 2005b;, it is still related to the procedural aspects of the interaction between the services. The interoperability notion discussed in this work instead is more related to assuring that declarative constraints specified in terms of DecSerFlow are indeed satisfied, given the DecSerFlow representation of both a global choreography and of a service.…”

“…As pointed out in [Baldoni et al 2005a], Service oriented architectures and Multi Agent Systems share many issues and features, and the problem of representing global interactions and of verifying them has been tackled also in the MAS field. In particular, it is possible to find in the literature two complementary approaches, as in the case of choreographies: approaches with aim to exactly specify how the interaction protocol should be executed by the interacting agents (such as for example AUML [Bauer et al 2001]), and approaches which consider MAS as open societies and model interaction protocols by declaratively constraining the possible interactions.…”

“…SCIFF is a framework based on Abductive Logic Programming (ALP) [Kakas et al 1993], originally developed within the SOCS EU Project 1 for the specification 4 · Montali, Pesic, van der Aalst, Chesani, Mello, Storari and verification of global interaction protocols in open Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), which share many aspects with the Service-oriented Computing setting [Baldoni et al 2005a]. Similarly to the case of service choreographies and DecSerFlow, the need for modeling global interaction protocols by respecting the autonomy and heterogeneity of interacting agents has motivated the shift from mentalistic approaches to declarative and social-based ones [Singh 2000].…”

Multimedia Content Provisioning Using Service Oriented Architectures

“…For the actual conformance tests, different approaches can be used. Popular instances are bisimulation [20] (or a variant of it [3]), as well as the checking of execution traces [4].…”