Nowadays, business processes that are intended to work across company boundaries usually consist of serveral services. The composition of these services then builds up a whole new service, which itself works on a cross-company basis. The basis of that interaction is formed by the paradigma of the Service-oriented Architecture (SOA). Within this architecture we distinguish three different types of actors: service provider, service requester and service broker. The service provider publishes information about his service using a service broker. The service broker manages the information he gets from different service providers and offers an appropriate interface for others to find a certain service and to connect to a service that is being managed by the service broker. A service requester may now look for a specific service of a service broker. The service requester then can connect his own service with the one found.
In this research topic we consider operating guidelines. Given a service of a service provider, an operating guideline is a compact description of all services of potential service requesters that fit to the given one. Hence, the operating guideline of a service provides sufficient information to be given to the service broker.
Furthermore, we study the question of whether two services match. To answer that question we use the operating guideline of a given service and analyze whether the service of a service requester respects that operating guideline. If this is true, we can guarantee that the service of the service requester and the service of the service provider fit together and that they are able to interact properly. If the service does not match with the operating guideline of the provided service, the two services can not interact properly. The interaction causes problems such as deadlocks or messages are not handled properly.
We use Petri Nets and automata to model the services we analyze. A specific class of annotated automata then represents a set of (not annotated) automata in a compact way. Those annotated automata are represented by shared BDDs.
The development of algorithms and tools concerning operating guidelines is part of the project Tools4BPEL. We encourage students who are interested in this work to join our project.