Title: An algorithm for matching non-deterministic services with operating guidelines

Authors: Peter Massuthe, Karsten Wolf

Addresses: Institut fur Informatik, Humboldt–Universitat zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, Berlin 10099, Germany. ' Institut fur Informatik, Universitat Rostock, Rostock 18051, Germany

Abstract: Interorganisational cooperation is more and more organised 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 non-deterministic 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 artefact to realise the publish operation. In our approach, the find operation reduces to a matching problem between the requester|s service and the published operating guidelines. If matching services are actually bound together, our approach guarantees deadlock-free interaction. In this paper, matching of deterministic as well as non-deterministic automata with operating guidelines is presented.

Keywords: services; service-oriented architectures; SOA; non-deterministic automata; operating guidelines; matching; inter-organisational cooperation; service interaction; service modelling.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBPIM.2007.015129

International Journal of Business Process Integration and Management, 2007 Vol.2 No.2, pp.81 - 90

Published online: 18 Sep 2007 *

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