Modeling business processes has become a common activity in industry, but it is increasingly carried out by non-experts. This raises a challenge: How to ensure that the resulting process models are of sufficient quality? This paper contends that a prior structuring of domain knowledge, as found in informal specifications, will positively influence the act of process modeling in various measures of performance. This idea is tested and confirmed with a controlled experiment, which involved 83 master students in business administration and industrial engineering from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and Eindhoven University of Technology. In line with the reported findings, our recommendation is to explore ways to bring more structure in the specifications that are used as input for process modeling endeavors.

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.

The accordance pre-order describes whether a service can safely be replaced by another service. That is, all partners for the original service should be partners for the new service. Partners for a service interact with the service in such a way that always a certain common goal can be reached. We relate the accordance pre-order to the pre-orders known from the linear-branching time spectrum, notably fair testing. The differences between accordance and fair testing include the modeling of termination and success, and the parts of the services that cannot be used reliably by any partner. Apart from the theoretical results, we address the practical relevance of the introduced concepts.

Service-oriented computing aims to create complex systems by composing less-complex systems, called services. Since services can be developed independently, the integration of services requires an adaptation mechanism for bridging any incompatibilities. Behavioral adapters aim to adjust the communication between some services to be composed in order to establish proper interaction between them. We present a novel approach for specifying such adapters, based on domain-specific transformation rules that reflect the elementary operations that adapters can perform. We also present a novel way to synthesize complex adapters that adhere to these rules, viz., by consistently separating data and control, and by using existing controller-synthesis algorithms. Our approach has been implemented, and we discuss some example applications, including real business processes in WS-BPEL.

Service-Oriented Computing is an emerging computing paradigm that supports the modular design of (software) systems. Complex systems are designed by composing less complex systems, called services. Such a (complex) system is a distributed application often involving several cooperating enterprises. As a system usually changes over time, individual services will be substituted by other services. Substituting one service by another one should not affect the correctness of the overall system. Assuring correctness becomes particularly challenging, as the services rely on each other, and each of the involved enterprises only oversees a part of the overall system. In addition, services communicate asynchronously which makes the analysis even more difficult. For this reason, formal methods to support service substitution are indispensable. In this thesis, we study service substitution at the level of service models. Thereby we restrict ourselves to service behavior. As a formalism to model service behavior, we use Petri nets. The first contribution of this thesis is the definition of several substitutability criteria that are suitable in the context of Service-Oriented Computing. Substituting a service S by a service S' should preserve some behavioral properties of the overall system. For each set of behavioral properties and a given service S, there exists a set of behaviorally compatible services for S. A substitutability criterion defines which of these behaviorally compatible services of S have to be preserved by S'. We relate our substitutability criteria to preorders and equivalences known from process theory. The second contribution of this thesis is to present, for each substitutability criterion, a procedure to decide whether a service S' can substitute a service S. The decision requires the comparison of the in general infinite sets of behaviorally compatible services for the services S and S'. Hence, we extend existing work on an abstract representation of all behaviorally compatible services for a given service. For each notion of behavioral compatibility, we present an algorithmic solution to represent all behaviorally compatible services. Based on these representations, we can decide substitutability of a service S by a service S'. The third contribution of this thesis is a method to support the design of a service S' that can substitute a service $S$ according to a substitutability criterion. Our approach is to derive a service S' from the service S by stepwise transformation. To this end, we present several transformation rules. Finally, we formalize and we extend the equivalence notion for services specified in the language WS-BPEL. That way, we demonstrate the applicability of our work.

In a service-oriented architecture (SOA), a service broker assigns a previously published service (stored in a service registry) to a service requester. It is desirable for the composition of the requesting and the assigned service to interact properly. While proper interaction is often reduced to deadlock freedom of the composed system, we additionally consider livelock freedom as a desirable property for the interaction of services. In principle, deadlock- and livelock freedom can be verified by inspecting the state space of the composition of (public views of) the involved services. The contribution of this paper is to propose a methodology to build that state space from pre-computed fragments which are computed upon publishing a service. That way, we shift computation time from the time critical request phase of service brokerage to the less critical publish phase. Interestingly, our setting enables state space reduction methods that are intrinsically different from traditional state space reductions.

Services change over time, be it for internal improvements, be it for external requirements such as new legal regulations. For long running services, it may even be necessary to change a service while instances are actually running and interacting with other services. This problem is referred to as instance migration. We present a novel approach to the behavioral (service protocol) aspects of instance migration. We apply techniques for finitely characterizing the set of all correctly interacting partners to a given service. The approach assures that migration does not introduce behavioral problems with any running partner of the original service. Our technique scales up to services with thousands of states, including models of real WS-BPEL processes.

We compare two Petri net semantics for the Web Services Business Process Execution Language (BPEL). The comparison reveals different modelling decisions. These decisions together with their consequences are discussed. We also give an overview of the different properties that can be verified on the resulting models. A case study helps to evaluate the corresponding compilers which transform a BPEL process into a Petri net model.

We study the correct interaction between services using the following notion for correctness: there is no deadlock in the interaction of the services, and a given set of activities is not dead, that is, each activity in this set is executed in at least one run. The second condition has not been studied before. An operating guideline of a service P is an operational characterization of all deadlock-free interacting partners of P. In this paper, we present an extension of the concept of an operating guideline to characterize all correctly interacting partners of a service P. This extension can be used for answering at least the following two questions. First, given a service R, does R interact correctly with P? Second, given a service P', can P be substituted by P', that is, is every correctly interacting partner of P a correctly interacting partner of P', too?

In this paper, we present a framework that allows us to orchestrate web services such that the web services involved in this orchestration interact properly. To achieve this, we predefine service interfaces and certain routing constructs. Furthermore, we define a number of rules to incrementally compute the price of such a properly interacting orchestration (i.e. a web service) from the price of its web services. The fact that a web service gets only payed after its service is delivered (no-cure-no-pay) is reflected by considering a probability of success. To determine a safe price that includes the risk a web service takes, we consider the variance of costs.

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.

Petri nets are frequently composed of given nets. Literature suggests a lot of different composition operators, for different purposes and different classes of Petri nets. Formal definitions are frequently surprisingly technical, not matching the intuitively very elegant composition of Petri nets in the framework of their graphical representation. This paper suggests the universal net composition operator. This operator allows to specify any specific composition variant by very simple means, leaving all technical details to the operator, where they are treated once and for all. General properties of composition, in particular associativity, are inherited by all instantiations of the operator. We show the practical advantage of the universal composition operator by means of a lot of examples from various areas of Petri nets.

Service-oriented Computing and Service-oriented Architectures aspire to better exploit existing middleware technologies. To this end, a more flexible, platform independent software design methodology is suggested, to develop rapid, low cost, interoperable, evolving and massively distributed software systems. Intended application areas include electronic commerce, information systems, supply chain control, and many other areas. Time is ripe to underpin this effort by theoretically well-founded concepts to model services, and to analyze such models. In this paper we suggest first proposals and principles for a comprehensive theory of services.

WS-BPEL defines a standard for executable business processes. Executable processes are business processes which can be automated through an IT infrastructure. The WS-BPEL specification also introduces the concept of abstract processes: In contrast to their executable siblings, abstract processes are not executable and can have parts where business logic is disguised. Nevertheless, the WS-BPEL specification introduces a notion of compatibility between such an under-specified abstract process and a fully specified executable one. Basically, this compatibility notion defines a set of syntactical rules that can be augmented or restricted by profiles. So far, there exists two of such profiles: the Abstract Process Profile for Observable Behavior and the Abstract Process Profile for Templates. None of these profiles defines a concept of behavioral equivalence. Therefore, both profiles are too strict with respect to the rules they impose when deciding whether an executable process is compatible to an abstract one. In this paper, we propose a novel profile that extends the existing Abstract Process Profile for Observable Behavior by defining a behavioral relationship. We also show that our novel profile allows for more flexibility when deciding whether an executable and an abstract process are compatible.

A service is designed to interact with other services. If the service interaction is stateful and asynchronous, the interaction protocol can become quite complex. A service may be able to interact with a lot of possible partner services, one partner or no partner at all. Having no partner surely is not intended by the designer. But the stateful interaction between services can be formalized and thus analyzed at design time. We present a formalization which is centered around a graph data structure that we call interaction graph, which represents feasible runs of a partner service according to the interaction protocol. As interaction graphs suffer from state explosion, we introduce a set of suitable reduction rules to alleviate the complexity of our approach. As our case studies show we are able to analyze the interaction behavior of a service efficiently.

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 \emphflexible model generation which allows the generation of compact Petri net models. A case study demonstrates the value of this technology chain.

Abstract State Machines (henceforth referred to as just ASM) were introduced as ä computation model that is more powerful and more universal than standard computation models\" by Yuri Gurevich in 1985. Here we provide some intuitive and motivating arguments, and characteristic examples for (the elementary version of) ASM. The intuition of ASM as a formal framework for \"pseudocode\" algorithms is highlightes. Generalizing variants of the fundamental \"sequential small-step\" version of ASM are also considered.

The Scholten/Dijkstra "Pebble Game" is re-examined. We show that the algorithm lends itself to a distributed as well as an online version, and even to a reversed variant. Technically this is achieved by exploiting the local and the reversible nature of Petri Net transitions. Furthermore, these properties allow to retain the verification arguments of the algorithm.

Das Paradigma der service-orientierten Architektur beschreibt eine Kapselung einzelner Funktionalitäten von Softwaresystemen in Services. Ein Service besitzt somit eine bestimmte Funktionalität und zudem eine definierte Schnittstelle. Über diese Schnittstelle kann die Funktionalität des Services genutzt werden. Durch diese Trennung von Funktionalität und Schnittstelle ist ein Service unabhängig von der Plattform und der verwendeten Programmiersprache. Änderungen und Erweiterungen service-basierter Softwaresysteme können durch Anpassungen oder das Austauschen des betreffenden Services erreicht werden und sind daher im Vergleich zu anderen Systemen einfacher, schneller und mit einem geringeren Risiko umsetzbar. Web Services sind eine spezielle und weit verbreitete Form von Services. Ein Web Service ist ein eigenständiges Softwaremodul, dessen Funktionalität über das Internet angeboten wird. Mit der Web Service Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) kann ein Web Service definiert werden, der den Geschäftsprozess eines Unternehmens abbildet. WS-BPEL besitzt hierfür Konstrollstrukturen und Funktionalität zur Behandlung von Fehlern und Ausnahmen. WS-BPEL besitzt keine formale Semantik und kann daher nicht formal analysiert werden. Für eine formale Analyse kann ein WS-BPEL Prozess in ein offenes Workflownetz (oWFN) übersetzt werden. Existiert für ein oWFN ein Partner, der verklemmungsfrei mit diesem oWFN interagiert, kann ein Serviceautomat (SVA) berechnet werden, der das Verhalten dieses Partners beschreibt. Bisher war es möglich, ein oWFN nach WS-BPEL zu übersetzen, aber nicht, ein oWFN aus einem SVA zu synthetisieren. Ein berechneter Partner für einen WS-BPEL Prozess in Form eines SVAs konnte somit bisher nicht zurück in WS-BPEL übersetzt werden. Das Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es, die Synthese eines oWFNS aus einem SVA zu definieren und somit den Vorgang der Berechnung eines Partners für einen WS-BPEL Prozesss zu vervollständigen.

Mit der vorliegenden Arbeit wird die Implementation von GRETA - Graphical Runtime EnvironmenT for Adaptive Processes vorgestellt. GRETA ist eine modellbasierte Laufzeitumgebung für dynamische, sich während des Ablaufes anpassende Prozesse. Für die Implementation wurde ein formales Begriffsgebäude aufgebaut, das auf einer noch in der Entwicklung befindlichen Theorie basiert und einen Teil dieser Theorie berücksichtigt. Die Theorie, das vereinfachte Begriffsgebäude und die dafür ausgearbeiteten Algorithmen werden vorgestellt. GRETA wurde als grafischer Editor implementiert, mit dem solche dynamischen Prozesse modelliert werden können und wurde zu einem Simulationswerkzeug erweitert. Mit GRETA ist es möglich, zukünftige Forschungsergebnisse zu der genannten Theorie zu erproben. Das Programm wurde mit dem Eclipse-Framework GMF (Graphical Modeling Framework) erstellt. In dem Dokument gibt es eine Einführung in die Konzepte und die Funktionalittät von GMF. Die für GRETA genutzten Features von GMF werden erläutert.

In dieser Arbeit werden wir uns mit Diamantenstrukturen in Bedienungsanleitungen beschäftigen. Im Rahmen der Service-Oriented Architecture beschreiben Bedienungsanleitungen Kommunikationspartner (Strategien) von Diensten. Ein großer Vorteil der Bedienungsanleitungen ist die endliche Repräsentation der gewöhnlich unendlich großen Menge aller Strategien eines Dienstes. Bedienungsanleitungen können nichtsdestotrotz sehr groß werden. Diamantenstrukturen sind eine der Hauptursachen dafür. Wir wollen eine Kurzschreibweise einführen, die das Eintreten von Ereignissen in jeder beliebigen Reihenfolge in einem Zustandsübergang beschreibt. Anschließend werden wir verschiedene Muster für Diamantenstrukturen vorstellen, also Muster mit Ereignissen, die in jeder beliebigen Reihenfolge stattfinden können. Für diese Muster werden wir Ersetzungen mit der eingeführten Kurzschreibweise angeben. Wir werden ferner Algorithmen angeben, welche die von uns definierten Diamantenmuster in Bedienungsanleitungen erkennen.

Petrinetze sind eine formale Methode zur Modellierung und Analyse von Systemen. Ein großes Problem bei der Analyse von Petrinetzen ist die Größe des Zustandsraums. Um dieses Problem abzuschwächen, können Reduktionstechniken eingesetzt werden. Petrinetze sind einer der wenigen Formalismen, die die Möglichkeit bieten, bereits die Struktur des Modells zu reduzieren. Diese strukturellen Reduktionstechniken verändern die Struktur des Netzes und bewahren dabei bestimmte Eigenschaften des ursprünglichen Modells. Es existieren eine Vielzahl wissenschaftlicher Arbeiten, die strukturelle Reduktionstechniken untersuchen. In der vorliegenden Arbeit werden strukturelle Reduktionstechniken einander gegenübergestellt und katalogisiert. Es wird ermittelt, welche Eigenschaften eines ursprünglichen Natzes durch die Anwendung der Reduktionstechnik bewahrt und für welche Netzklasse diese Reduktionstechnik gilt. Die Reduktionstechniken werden miteinander verglichen und die Beziehungen der Regeln zueinander ermittelt. Basierend auf diesen Ergebnissen wird ein Katalog erstellt, der beschreibt, für welche Netzklasse das Anwenden einer Regel welche Eigenschaften bewahrt.

Die Web Services Business Process Execution Language ist eine Sprache zur Modellierung von Geschäftsprozessen als Web Services. Für eine umfassende Analyse von WS-BPEL-Prozessen müssen auch die Daten der Prozesse analysiert werden. Daten werden in WS-BPEL-Prozessen mit Hilfe von XML-Schema typisiert und standardmäßig mit Hilfe von XPath manipuliert. Eine Datenanalyse für WS-BPEL muss deshalb XML-Schema berücksichtigen die im Prozess enthaltenen XPath-Ausdrücke auswerten. Eine solche Datenanalyse ermöglicht Rückschlüsse auf den Kontrollfluss und dient so beispielsweise zur Optimierung eines WS-BPEL-Prozesses. In der vorliegenden Arbeit wird ein Verfahren zur abstrakten Interpetation von XPath-Ausdrücken in WS-BPEL-Prozessen vorgestellt. Dafür wird ein umfassendes Datenmodell für WS-BPEL-Prozesse sowie die enthaltenen XPath-Ausdrücke entwickelt. Auf Grundlage des entwickelten Datenmodells stellen wir eine statische Analyse vor, die die XPath-Ausdrücke in einem WS-BPEL-Prozess abstrakt interpretiert. Die Analyse berechnet dabei die Wertebereiche für Variablen und Bedingungen in WS-BPEL-Prozessen.

Usually, a component in a distributed system has assumptions about the remaining components of the system. A change in one component might require to change other components as well. It may happen that the change has to be performed in the running system. In this paper, we propose a formal model for systems that change their behavior at run-time: An adaptive system is denoted as a set of scenarios using a Petri net syntax. Our operational model provides an adaptation operator that synthesizes and adapts the system behavior as a Petri net branching-process at run-time based on the given scenarios. We show the feasibility of our approach by the help of an example.

We present a formal semantics for a variant of UML2 Activity Diagrams that is used in the IBM WebSphere Business Modeler for modeling business processes. Business process models created in the IBM WebSphere Business Modeler or with other UML2 modeling tools often constitutes one of the key specification artifacts for building an information system that implements or supports the specified processes. As UML2 Activity Diagrams lack a universally agreed semantics, the step from specification to implementation usually faces a semantical impedance caused by different interpretation of the same diagram. A well-defined formal semantics for the specification language determines the interpretation of a diagram and allows for reasoning about as well as validating and verifying a given specification on common (formal) grounds. We adapt approaches for formalizing semantics of UML2 Activity Diagrams and apply them to the core features of the IBM WebSphere Business Modeler language for purpose of formal verification. We provide a parameterized Petri net pattern for each language concepts. A diagram is translated by instantiating a pattern for each use of a concept; merging the resulting Petri net fragments according to the structure of the original diagram yields a Petri net that specifies the behavioral semantics of the diagram. The resulting Petri net can be verified for control-flow errors using the model checker LoLA. The semantics has been implemented in a tool that is available at http://www.service-technology.org/uml2owfn/.

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 serviceableness 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 serviceableness problem for subclasses of open nets in earlier work, this article shows that the problem is in general undecidable.

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 deprecation 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.

In this paper, we present a framework that allows us to orchestrate web services such that the web services involved in this orchestration interact properly. To achieve this, we predefine service interfaces and certain routing constructs. Furthermore, we define a number of rules to incrementally compute the price of such a properly interacting orchestration (i.e. a web service) from the price of its web services. The fact that a web service gets only payed after its service is delivered (no-cure-no-pay) is reflected by considering a probability of success. To determine a safe price that includes the risk a web service takes, we consider the variance of costs.

Behavioral adapters are a way to establish proper interaction between services that have been developed independently. We present a novel approach for specifying such adapters, based on domain-specific transformation rules that reflect the elementary operations that adapters can perform. We show how complex adapters that adhere to these rules can be generated using existing controller generation algorithms. We discuss some example applications, including real-world business processes.

We present an extension of a Petri net semantics for the Web Service Business Execution Language (WS-BPEL). This extension covers the novel activities and constructs introduced by the recent WS-BPEL 2.0 specification. Furthermore, we simplify several aspects of the Petri net semantics to allow for more compact models suited for computer-aided verification.

The Business Process Execution Language for Web Services WS-BPEL provides an technology to aggregate encapsulated functionalities for defining high-value Web services. For a distributed application in a B2B interaction, the partners simply need to expose their provided functionality as BPEL processes and compose them. Verifying such distributed web service based systems has been a huge topic in the research community lately - cf. [4] for a good overview. However, in most of the work on analyzing properties of interacting Web Services, especially when backed by stateful implementations like WS-BPEL, the data flow present in the implementation is widely neglected, and the analysis focusses on control flow only. This might lead to false-positive analysis results when searching for design weaknesses and errors, e.g. analyzing the controllability [14] of a given BPEL process. In this paper, we present a method to extract data flow information by constructing a CSSA representation and detecting data dependencies that effect communication behavior. Those discovered dependencies are used to construct a more precise formal model of the given BPEL process and hence to improve the quality of analysis results.

Enacting tasks in a workflow cannot always follow a pre-defined process model. In application domains like disaster management workflows are partially specified and circumstances of their enactment change. There exist various approaches for formal workflow models that are effective in such situations, like declarative specifications instead of operational models for formalizing flexible workflow process. These powerful models leave a gap to existing techniques in the domain of workflow modeling, workflow analysis, and workflow management. In this paper we bridge this gap with a compositional mechanism for translating declarative workflow models to operational workflow models. The mechanism is of a general nature and we reveal its principles as we provide an exemplary definition for translating DecSerFlow models based on LTL to Petri nets. We then demonstrate its use in analyzing and refining declarative models.

Fast and effective disaster management requires access to a multitude of heterogeneous, distributed, and quickly changing data sets, such as maps, satellite images, or governmental databases. In the last years, also the information created by affected persons on web sites such as flickr.com or blogger.com became an important and very quickly adapting source of information. We developed HUODINI, a prototype system for the flexible integration and visualization of heterogeneous data sources for disaster management. HUODINI is based on Semantic Web technologies, and in particular RDF, to offer maximal flexibility in the types of data sources it can integrate. It supports a hybrid push/pull approach to cater for the requirements of fast-changing sources, such as news feeds, and maximum performance for querying the integrated data set. In this paper, we describe the design goals underlying our approach, its architecture, and report on first experiences with the system.

The problem and need for adapting business processes and service behavior to cope with changing circumstances is identified well. Standard models for business processes still rely on a fixed process logic, the change of which is rather hard to achieve. Ad-hoc changes to a standard model are usually considered too `dangerous' as they are performed in not well-defined manner. Other models for adaptive processes deviate to some extent from established business process models. This deviation comes at the price of limited understandability and loss in analysis capabilities. We propose a model for adaptive processes based on Petri nets which have successfully been applied in modeling and analyzing business process and web services. Our operator to adapt the behavior of such models is formalized by the help of scenario-based concepts known from live-sequence charts in purely mathematical terms. This combination of concepts allows to write down the result of the adaptation rather than how adaptation shall be performed.

In this paper we present a pattern-based approach for synthesizing truly distributed Petri nets from a class of LTL specifications. The synthesis allows for the automatic, correct generation of humanly conceivable Petri nets, thus circumventing a manual construction of nets, or the use of Büuchi automata which are not distributed and often less intuitive to understand.

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 requesters 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.

We present an Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)-based architecture framework. The architecture framework is designed to be close to industry standards, especially to the Service ComponentArchitecture (SCA).The framework is language independent and the building blocks of each system, activities and data, are first class citizens.We present a meta model of the architecture framework and discuss its concepts in detail. Through the framework, concepts of an SOA such as wiring, correlation and instantiation can be clarified.

Interacting services raise a number of new software engineering challenges. To meet these challenges, the behaviour of the involved services must be considered. We present results regarding the behaviour of services in isolation, the interaction of services in choreographies, the exchangeability of a service, and the synthesis of desired partner services.

Concurrent runs reveal more insight into distributed systems than interleaved runs. This is shown by help of Dijkstra's paradigm of five philosophers.

Unternehmen sind bestrebt, immer mehr Geschäfte mit ihren Kunden teilweise oder vollständig automatisiert abzuwickeln. In diesem Bestreben machen sie mehr und mehr Gebrauch von der serviceorientierten Architektur (SOA). Grundbaustein der SOA ist der Service, der eine von einem Unternehmen angebotene Dienstleistung oder Funktionalität über eine wohldefinierte Schnittstelle bereitstellt und von Kunden oder Services anderer Unternehmen verwendet werden kann. Damit wir zwei Services als sinnvoll miteinander interagierend bezeichnen können, müssen sie verschiedene Mindestanforderungen erfüllen. Auf Grundlage dieser Mindestanforderungen können wir für jeden gegebenen Service eine Bedienungsanleitung konstruieren, die alle sinnvoll mit ihm interagierenden Services charakterisiert. Auch tritt die Frage auf, gegen welche Services ein Service ausgetauscht werden kann, so dass alle Services, die mit dem alten sinnvoll interagieren konnten, auch mit dem neuen sinnvoll interagieren können. Diesen allgemeinen Austauschbarkeitsbegriff parametrisieren wir in der vorliegenden Arbeit und beschäftigen uns mit dem Fall, dass durch den Austausch eines Services nur eine bestimmte Menge von Services unberührt bleiben soll, weil dies eine größere Freiheit in der Wahl des austauschenden Service erlaubt. Wir werden die Menge der Services, gegen die sich ein bestimmter Service bezüglich einer gegebenen Menge von Services austauschen lässt, mit Hilfe des Konzepts der Bedienungsanleitungen genau charakterisieren.

In dieser Arbeit präsentieren wir eine Transformation von offenenWorkflow-Netzen zu abstrakten WS-BPEL-Prozessen. Als Web Services implementierte Geschäftsprozesse sind zunehmend verbreiteter und von größerer finanzieller Bedeutung. Daher müssen sie vor ihrem Einsatz auf wichtige Eigenschaften wie korrekte Terminierung oder Bedienbarkeit überprüft werden. Die häufig eingesetzte Modellierungssprache WS-BPEL ist jedoch auf Grund ihrer fehlenden formalen Semantik nicht analysierbar. Aus diesem Grund existieren Werkzeuge zur Überführung von WS-BPEL-Prozessen in die Petrinetzklasse der offenen Workflow-Netze. Für diese kann auf eine Reihe von Tools zur formalen Analyse von Geschäftsprozessen zurückgegriffen werden. Unsere Transformation ermöglicht es, die Ergebnisse dieser Analysewerkzeuge vollautomatisch in WS-BPEL-Prozesse zurück zu übersetzen. So können unter anderem Beispiele für im Prozess auftretende Fehler und bedienende Partner als WS-BPEL-Code an den Anwender zurückgegeben werden, ohne dass dieser sich dazu mit den, in den Zwischenschritten der Analyse verwendeten, Petrinetzen auskennen muss. Zudem bietet unsere Transformation die Möglichkeit Geschäftsprozesse graphbasiert als offene Workflow-Netze zu modellieren und diese anschließend automatisch in einen abstrakten WS-BPEL-Prozess zu übersetzen.

In dieser Arbeit stellen wir Möglichkeiten vor, nicht-funktionale Eigenschaften einer GALS-Schaltung mittels Modellierung, Abstraktion und Verifikation zu analysieren. Im Mittelpunkt der Untersuchungen steht vor allem das Zeitverhalten und die Funktionssicherheit der Schaltung. Mit geeigneten Datenflussmodellen, in denen Zeit explizit modelliert ist, werden diese Eigenschaften untersucht. Da die Modellierung von Zeit die Komplexität des Modells erhöht und damit auch die Verikation erschwert, modellieren wir den Datenfluss möglichst abstrakt. Wir schlagen in dieser Arbeit mehrere Abstraktionstechniken vor, die den Zustandsraum des Datenmodells reduzieren.

In der Welt der Service Orientierten Architektur (SOA) besteht der Bedarf, Dienste auf ihre mögliche Interaktion mit anderen Diensten hin zu untersuchen. Dienste werden wir in Form von Serviceautomaten betrachten, die als asynchron kommunizierende Automaten definiert sind. Um die Frage einer sinnvollen, also verklemmungsfreien Kommunikation zu klären, gibt es das Konzept der Bedienungsanleitungen. Wie werden für diese ein scharfes Kriterium für die Wahl der Endzustände angeben und zeigen, dass diese Wahl sich in vorhandene Konzepte integriert. Besonderes Augenmerk werden wir dabei auf den Liberalsten Partner und den Public View eines Serviceautomaten werfen und an diesen unsere Definition rechtfertigen.

Die Analyse und Optimierung der Geschäftsprozesse ist von enormer Bedeutung für den langfristigen Erfolg eines Unternehmens. Die Märkte sind heutzutage zunehmend global und befinden sich in stetem Wandel, was eine fortwährende Überprüfung und Anpassung der Prozesse innerhalb eines Unternehmens erfordert. Durch den rasanten technologischen Fortschritt und den vermehrten Einsatz von Computern lassen sich immer größere Teile von Prozessen automatisieren. Einen neuen Ansatz zur Realisierung der IT-Infrastruktur in Unternehmen stellt dabei die service-orientierte Architektur (SOA) dar. Services, die eine wohldefinierte Funktionalität in einem Netzwerk zur Verfügung stellen, lassen sich unter relativ geringem Aufwand zu neuen Prozessen kombinieren und bei Bedarf ersetzen, ohne dass eine kostenintensive Anpassung vorhandener Lösungen erforderlich ist. Über das Internet können Dienste als sog. Web-Services zur Verfügung gestellt werden und so in die Abläufe der Prozesse anderer Unternehmen integriert werden. Um Services für potentielle Interessenten bekannt zu machen, muss eine Beschreibung der Funktionalität bei einem Verzeichnisdienst (service broker) hinterlegt werden. Im Bereich der Veröffentlichung von Services in Verzeichnisdiensten bieten sich zwei Konzepte zur Abstraktion von unternehmensinternen Informationen der Prozesse an: der Public View und die Bedienungsanleitung. Während für beliebige Prozesse eine Bedienungsanleitung automatisch berechnet werden kann und es Algorithmen gibt, die auf Basis der Bedienungsanleitungen entscheiden können, ob zwei Prozesse problemlos miteinander interagieren können, muss ein Public View bisher noch von einem Entwickler per Hand modelliert werden. Eine solche Modellierung ist jedoch aufwendig, fehleranfällig und kann ohne eine anschließende Verifikation nicht garantieren, dass sich der ursprüngliche Prozess P und sein Public View P' in Bezug auf die Bedienbarkeit äquivalent verhalten. Wir wollen uns in dieser Arbeit daher mit Verfahren zur automatischen Public-View-Generierung befassen. Verschiedene Ansätze werden im Detail vorgestellt und miteinander verglichen. Anhand von Fallstudien werden wir die Stärken und Schwächen der Verfahren näher beleuchten und Empfehlungen zu deren Einsatz ableiten.

In this paper we propose a framework for SOA covering such important features as proper termination (soundness) and correct correlation of tasks. Within this framework, we define a method for the calculation of the price of services. Our framework is compositional in the sense that composing a system from subsystems that meet our correctness requirements we obtain a system that still meets these requirements.

Um Entwurf und Verifikation komplizierter verteilter Algorithmen leichter und verständlicher zu machen, wird oft eine Verfeinerungsmethode verwendet. Dabei wird ein einfacher Algorithmus, der gewünschte Eigenschaften erfüllt, schrittweise zu einem komplizierten Algorithmus verfeinert. In jedem Schritt sollen die gewünschten Eigenschaften erhalten bleiben. Für nachrichtenbasierte verteilte Algorithmen, die durch Petrinetze modelliert werden, haben wir eine neue Verfeinerungsmethmode entwickelt. Wir beginnen mit einem Anfangsalgorithmus, der Aktionen enthält, die gemeinsame Aufgaben mehrerer Agenten beschreiben. In jedem Schritt verfeinern wir eine dieser Aktionen zu einem Netz, das nur solche Aktionen enthält, die die Aufgaben einzelner Agenten beschreiben. Jeder Schritt ist also eine Verteilung einer unverteilten Aktion, also eine verteilende Verfeinerung. Die Arbeit klärt den Zusammenhang von Eigenschaften des Verfeinerungsnetzes und den bei der Verfeinerung gültig bleibenden Eigenschaften des verfeinerten Algorithmus. Hierbei sind Kausalitäten im Verfeinerungsnetz von entscheidender Bedeutung. Die Anwendung der Methode wird in der Arbeit an anschaulichen Beispielen demonstriert.

WS-BPEL defines a standard for executable business processes. Executable processes are business processes which can be automated through an IT infrastructure. The WS-BPEL specification also introduces the concept of abstract processes: In contrast to their executable siblings, abstract processes are not executable and can have parts where business logic is disguised. Nevertheless, the WS-BPEL specification introduces a notion of compatibility between such an under-specified abstract process and a fully specified executable one. Basically, this compatibility notion defines a set of syntactical rules that can be augmented or restricted by profiles. So far, there exists two of such profiles: the Abstract Process Profile for Observable Behavior and the Abstract Process Profile for Templates. None of these profiles defines a concept of behavioral equivalence. Therefore, both profiles are too strict with respect to the rules they impose when deciding whether an executable process is compatible to an abstract one. In this paper, we propose a novel profile that extends the existing Abstract Process Profile for Observable Behavior by defining a behavioral relationship. We also show that our novel profile allows for more flexibility when deciding whether an executable and an abstract process are compatible.

We compare two Petri net semantics for the Web Services Business Process Execution Language (BPEL). The comparison reveals different modeling decisions. These decisions together with their consequences are discussed.We also give an overview of the different properties that can be verified on the resulting models. A case study helps to evaluate the corresponding compilers which transform a BPEL process into a Petri net model.

Recently, we introduced the concept of an operating guideline of a service as a structure that characterizes all its properly interacting partner services. The hitherto considered correctness criterion is deadlock freedom of the composition of both services. In practice, there are intended and unintended deadlock-freely interacting partners of a service. In this paper, we provide a formal approach to express intended and unintended behavior as behavioral constraints. With such a constraint, unintended partners can be ``filtered'' yielding a customized operating guideline. Customized operating guidelines can be applied to validate a service and for service discovery.

A contract specifies an interorganizational process together with a distribution of responsibilities for the activities among the parties involved. In this paper, we formally show how a party can implement its part of the contract such that the implementation accords with the contract. We propose a formal notion of a contract and give a criterion for accordance between a local implementation and a contract such that, if all local implementations accord with the contract, the overall process is deadlock-free and it is always possible to terminate properly. Then, we sketch a technique for automatically checking the proposed accordance criterion. Finally, we present accordance-preserving transformation rules. These rules can be used to implement a part of the contract while preserving the accordance criterion.

We present a SOA-based architecture framework. The architecture framework is designed to be close to industry standards, especially to the Service Component Architecture (SCA). The framework is language independent and the building blocks of each system, activities and data, are first class citizens. We present a \emphmeta model of the architecture framework and discuss its concepts in detail. Through the framework concepts such as wiring, correlation, and instantiation can be clarified. This allows us to demystify some of the confusion related to SOA.

The paradigm of Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) provides a framework for interorganizational business processes and for the emerging programming-in-the-large. The basic idea of SOC, the interaction of services, rises a lot of issues such as proper termination of interacting services or substitution of a service by another one. Such issues can be addressed by means of models of services. We show how services can intelligibly be modeled, and we present algorithms and tools to analyze properties of service models. To make sure that our models properly reflect real world issues of services, we model and investigate services represented in established languages such as WS-BPEL.

In this paper we present first results of a SOA-based architecture framework. The architecture framework is required to be close to industry standards, especially to service component architecture (SCA), language independent (i.e. it is adoptable) and the building blocks of each system, activities and data, are first class citizens. We present a meta model of the architecture framework and discuss its concepts in detail.

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 requester's 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.

In 1985, Gurevich introduced Abstract State Machines (ASMs) as a computational model more powerful and universal than classical computational models. Since then ASMs have been applied successfully both in theory and practice: On the theoretical side, ASMs evolved to a general basis for the study of different classes of algorithms and their expressive power. On the practical side, ASMs have been extended to a full-fledged design methodology, applied successfully in industry for the specification and analysis of real-world systems. In my doctoral thesis I examine the class of distributed ASMs and study their expressive power. I also intend to develop basic notions of refinement and composition for distributed ASMs.

In the service-oriented architecture (SOA), we distinguish three roles of service owners: service providers, service requesters, and service brokers, and the three standard operations publish, find, and bind. We provide a formal method based on Petri nets to model services. We 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.

A novel request-driven globally asynchronous locally synchronous (GALS) technique for the system integration of complex digital blocks is proposed. For this new GALS technique, an asynchronous wrapper compliant is developed and evaluated. This proposed GALS technique is applied to a baseband processor compatible with the wireless LAN standard IEEE 802.11a. The developed GALS baseband processor chip is fabricated and measured. Besides improvements of the system integration process, a 5 dB reduction in electromagnetic interference, 30\% reduction in instantaneous supply current variation, and similar dynamic power consumption as in the synchronous baseband processor is achieved.

Moderne Software-Systeme werden zunehmend nach dem Paradigma der ServiceorientiertenArchitektur (SOA) aus unabhängigen Services zusammengesetzt, die definierte Funktionen zur Verfügung stellen und Nachrichten miteinander austauschen. Eine Möglichkeit zur Gewährleistung der reibungslosen Kommunikation besteht in der Bereitstellung einer Bedienungsanleitung durch den Service Provider, mit der der Service Broker anhand eines Prüfverfahrens - dem Matching - entscheiden kann, ob der Service eines Service Requesters zu dem angebotenen Service passt. Für die praktische Anwendung müssen Bedienungsanleitungen in geeigneter Weise kodiert werden. In der vorliegenden Arbeit werden dazu Binäre Entscheidungsdiagramme (BDDs) genutzt. Für das Matching wird der Service des Service Requesters durch einen Serviceautomaten modelliert, der seinerseits ebenfalls in eine BDD-Darstellung überführt wird. Darauf aufbauend wird schließlich ein Matching-Algorithmus entwickelt und seine Korrektheit bewiesen. Die Effizienz der Kodierung durch BDDs und die Funktionsweise des BDD-basierten Matching-Algorithmus wird an Beispielen gezeigt.

Die Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL) ist eine Sprache zur Definitionvon Geschäftsprozessen als Web Services. Um Eigenschaften eines BPEL-Prozesses verifizieren zu können, entwickelte Stahl eine Transformation von BPEL4WS 1.1 in Petrinetze. Als Ergebnis des Standardisierungsprozesses von BPEL wird demnächst die Version WS-BPEL 2.0 verabschiedet werden. Da auch WS-BPEL 2.0 eine textuelle informelle Spezifikation zugrunde liegen wird, wäre eine angepasste Petrinetz-Semantik für Verifikationszwecke weiterhin sehr hilfreich. Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es deshalb, die nderungen von WS-BPEL 2.0 im Vergleich zum Vorgänger BPEL4WS 1.1 zu dokumentieren und Vorschläge in Bezug auf die Anpassung der vorhandenen Petrinetz-Semantik zu geben. Die Betrachtungen beziehen sich dabei auf eine Entwurfsfassung der kommenden Spezifikation von WS-BPEL 2.0 vom 16. März 2006.

Global asynchrone, lokal synchrone (GALS) Systeme vereinen dieVorteile synchroner und asynchroner Schaltungen und mindern zugleich ihre Nachteile. Ein GALS-System besteht aus mehreren lokal synchron arbeitenden Modulen, von denen jedes von einem asynchron arbeitenden Wrapper umhüllt wird. Durch diese Wrapper kommunizieren die Module asynchron miteinander. Das IHP Frankfurt hat auf Grundlage einer informalen Spezifikation einen GALS-Wrapper entwickelt. Erst nachträglich wurde ein formales Modell für diesen Wrapper erstellt und auf Korrektheit überprüft. Dabei wurden Fehler in der Implementierung gefunden und korrigiert. Wir beschreiben den Entwurf eines per Konstruktion korrekten Wrappers, der sich an der Schnittstelle zu seiner Umgebung genauso verhält, wie der Wrapper des IHP. Dazu modellieren wir erst sein Verhalten als Petrinetz und generieren danach aus diesem Modell mit dem Werkzeug petrify eine geschwindigkeitsinvariante Schaltung, die per Konstruktion korrekt arbeitet.

In this thesis we develop a state space reduction technique for networks of timed automata based on unfoldings to alleviate the state space explosion problem due to concurrently enabled actions. For the purpose of verifying a system, standard model checking techniques construct its sequential state space that suffers an exponential growth when applied to distributed systems because of concurrently enabled, independent actions: during the construction of the state space these actions are ordered arbitrarily to simulate concurrency in the sequential model. For untimed systems, state space reduction techniques like stubborn sets that omit the construction of redundant information, and unfoldings that represent concurrent events in a partial order have successfully been applied to alleviate the exponential growth. These techniques apply a simple syntactical criterion to identify independent actions. This criterion is not applicable to networks of timed automata as simple examples show, which renders the existing techniques unapplicable. But networks of timed automata face the state space explosion problem as well which raises the demand for a specific reduction technique for these systems. In this thesis, we consider a special, but practically relevant class of networks of timed automata as a formal model for discrete, distributed, timed systems. We develop a novel technique that constructs a complete, finite representation of such a system's state space. This representation is the complete, finite prefix of an unfolding in which concurrently enabled actions are partially ordered. We show that this technique is capable of reducing the size of the state space by magnitude. We are presently not aware of any state space reduction technique for timed automata with similar results.

Wir präsentieren die Reduktion einer Petrinetzsemantik für die Business Process Execution Language for Web Services, die alle Verklemmungen bewahrt und dabei die Petrinetzmuster so stark verkleinert, dass Model-Checking größerer Geschäftsprozesse ermöglicht wird. Dies geschieht, indem wir jedes Petrinetzmuster einzeln betrachten und verkleinern. Bisherige Versuche der computergestützten Analyse scheiterten auf Grund der Größe und Komplexität der entstandenen Petrinetze.

Gurevich's sequential Abstract State Machines (ASMs)are taken as a basis for the construction of distributed ASMs as sets of sequential ASMs. A theorem on the expressive power of distributed ASMs is proven in analogy to Gurevich's classical theorem on the expressive power of sequential ASMs.

Interorganizational cooperation is more and more organizedby 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 requester's service and the published operating guidelines. If matching services are actually bound together, our approach guarantees deadlockfree communication. In this paper, matching of deterministic as well as nondeterministic automata with operating guidelines is presented.

The internet today has grown to be more than just being a basis for exchanging information. It steadily becomes a platform for processing business processes. Many companies distribute their service with the help of web services or integrate other web services into their own workflow. However, before a web service gets published it should be examined well. We will introduce a way of examining the controllability of a web service. That means, we study whether a controller can actually use the functionality provided by the web service. We propose the interaction graph of a web service, that is modelled by an open workflow net. To verify whether such a net is controllable or not it is sufficient to construct a reduced interaction graph. We will define reduction rules that minimize the size of the graph greatly. The analysis using the interaction graph as well as the reduction rules shown in this paper are implemented and have been integrated into an analysis tool kit for web services.

We introduce the concept of an operating guideline for an arbitrary finite-state service P, extending the work of [1, 2] which was restricted to acyclic services. An operating guideline gives complete information about how to correctly (in this paper: deadlock-free) communicate with P. It can further be executed or used for service discovery. An operating guideline for P is a particular service S that is enriched with annotations. S communicates deadlock-free with P and is able to simulate every other service that communicates deadlock-free with P. The attached annotations give complete information about whether or not a simulated service is deadlock-free, too.

Conventional computational models assume a symbolical representation of states. Gurevich's Abstract State Machines (ASMs) take a more liberal position: any mathematical structure may serve as a state. Gurevich characterizes the expressive power of sequential ASMs in a non-trivial theorem: he defines the class of \emphsequential algorithms by help of only a few, amazingly general requirements and proves this class to be equivalent to sequential ASMs. Later, this result has been extended to the class of bounded-nondeterministic ASMs. This paper considers the general case of unbounded-nondeterministic ASMs: in each step, an unbounded-nondeterministic ASM may choose among infinitely many alternatives. We define the class of unbounded-nondeterministic algorithms by a conservative extension of Gurevich's original requirements to sequential algorithms. We show that this class is equivalent to unbounded-nondeterministic ASMs.

Wir untersuchen die Ausdrucksmächtigkeit von Petrinetz-Schemata. Dazuführen wir die Teilklasse der einfachen Petrinetz-Schemata ein und zeigen, welche Systeme sich durch ein einfaches Petrinetz-Schema darstellen lassen und welche nicht. Die hinreichenden und notwendigen Eigenschaften dazu formulieren wir in einem Theorem.