Peter Massuthe

An Operating Guideline Approach to the SOA

Interorganizational cooperation is more and more organized by the paradigm of services. The service-oriented architecture (SOA) provides a general framework for service interaction. It describes three roles, service provider, service requester, and service broker, together with the three operations publish, find, and bind. We provide a formal method based on Petri nets to model services and their cooperation. We characterize well-behaving pairs of requester’s and provider’s services and suggest operating guidelines as a convenient and intuitive artifact to realize publish. Then, the find operation reduces to a matching problem between the requester’s service and the operating guideline. Binding of a requester’s and a provider’s service is therefore guaranteed to result in a well-behaving cooperating service.

Analyzing interacting BPEL processes

This paper addresses the problem of analyzing the interaction between BPEL processes. We present a technology chain that starts out with a BPEL process and transforms it into a Petri net model. On the model we decide controllability of the process (the existence of a partner process, such that both can interact properly) and compute its operating guideline (a characterization of all properly interacting partner processes). A case study demonstrates the value of this technology chain.

Multiparty Contracts

To implement an interorganizational process between different enterprizes, one needs to agree on the ‘rules of engagement’. These can be specified in terms of a contract that describes the overall intended process and the duties of all parties involved. We propose to use such a process-oriented contract which can be seen as the composition of the public views of all participating parties. Based on this contract, each party may locally implement its part of the contract such that the implementation (the private view) agrees on the contract. In this paper, we propose a formal notion for such process-oriented contracts and give a criterion for accordance between a private view and its public view. The public view of a party can be substituted by a private view if and only if the private view accords with the public view. Using the notion of accordance, the overall implemented process is guaranteed to be deadlock-free and it is always possible to terminate properly. In addition, we present a technique for automatically checking our accordance criterion. A case study illustrates how our proposed approach can be used in practice.

Operating guidelines for finite-state services

We study services modeled as open workflow nets (oWFN) and describe their behavior as service automata. Based on arbitrary finite-state service automata, we introduce the concept of an operating guideline, generalizing the work of [1,2] which was restricted to acyclic services. An operating guideline gives complete information about how to properly interact (in this paper: deadlock-freely and with limited communication) with an oWFN N. It can be executed, thus forming a properly interacting partner of N, or it can be used to support service discovery. An operating guideline for N is a particular service automaton S that is enriched with Boolean annotations. S interacts properly with the service automaton Prov, representing the behavior of N, and is able to simulate every other service that interacts properly with Prov. The attached annotations give complete information about whether or not a simulated service interacts properly with Prov, too.

Analyzing interacting WS-BPEL processes using flexible model generation

We address the problem of analyzing the interaction between WS-BPEL processes. We present a technology chain that starts out with a WS-BPEL process and translates it into a Petri net model. On the model we decide controllability of the process (the existence of a partner process, such that both can interact properly) and compute its operating guideline (a characterization of all properly interacting partner processes). To manage processes of realistic size, we present a concept of a flexible model generation which allows the generation of compact Petri net models. A case study demonstrates the value of this technology chain.

Deciding Substitutability of Services with Operating Guidelines

Deciding whether a service S can be substituted by another service S *** is an important problem in practice and one of the research challenges in service-oriented computing. In this paper, we define three substitutability notions for services. Accordance specifies that S *** cooperates with at least the environments that S cooperates with. S and S *** are equivalent if they cooperate with the same environments. To guarantee that S *** cooperates with a fixed subset of environments that S cooperates with, the notion of restriction can be used. For each substitutability notion we present a decision algorithm. To this end we apply the concept of an operating guideline of a service as an abstract representation of all environments the service cooperates with.

Operating guidelines - an automata-theoretic foundation for the service-oriented architecture

In the service-oriented architecture (SOA), we distinguish three roles of service owners: service providers, service requesters, and service brokers. Each service provider publishes information to the broker about how requesters can interact with its service. Thus, the broker can assign a fitting service provider to a querying requester. We propose the information published to the broker to be operating guidelines. Operating guidelines are essentially communication instructions for the service requester. We present an automata-theoretic approach that is centered around operating guidelines and is capable of implementing all tasks arising in the SOA.

Can I find a partner? Undecidability of partner existence for open nets

We study open nets as Petri net models of web services, with a link to the practically relevant language WS-BPEL. For those nets, we investigate the problem of operability which we consider as fundamental as the successful notion of soundness for workflow nets, i.e., Petri net models of business processes and workflows. While we could give algorithmic solutions to the operability problem for subclasses of open nets in earlier work, this article shows that the problem is in general undecidable.

Compositional Service Trees

In the world of Service Oriented Architectures, one deals with networks of cooperating components. A component offers services; to deliver a service it possibly needs services of other components, thus forming a service tree . This tree is built dynamically and not known beforehand. It is hard to verify the behavior of a service tree by using standard verification techniques, because these techniques typically assume a static flattened model. In this paper we model a component by an open Petri net. We give a sufficient condition for proper completion (called soundness) that requires only pairwise checks of the service compositions. We also provide a correctness-by-construction approach for building services trees.

An Algorithm for Matching Nondeterministic Services with Operating Guidelines

Interorganizational cooperation is more and more organized by the paradigm of services. Service-oriented architectures (SOA) provide a general framework for service interaction. SOA describe three roles of services, the service provider, the service requester, and the service broker, together with the three operations publish, find, and bind. We provide a formal method based on nondeterministic automata to model services and their interaction. In this paper, we restrict ourselves to finite and acyclic automata. We suggest operating guidelines as a convenient and intuitive artifact to realize the publish operation. In our approach, the find operation reduces to a matching problem between the requesters service and the published operating guidelines. If matching services are actually bound together, our approach guarantees deadlock-free communication. In this paper, matching of deterministic as well as nondeterministic automata with operating guidelines is presented.