Handling Data-Based Concurrency in Context-Aware Service Protocols

TL;DR

This paper introduces a formal model and a dynamic composition language for context-aware service protocols that manage data dependencies and concurrency, with verification techniques to prevent inconsistencies and a supporting prototype tool.

Contribution

It presents a novel formal model and a composition language for handling data dependencies in concurrent context-aware service protocols, including automatic verification methods.

Findings

The approach effectively manages data dependencies among concurrent protocols.

Verification techniques detect inconsistencies during protocol composition.

A prototype tool demonstrates practical applicability.

Abstract

Dependency analysis is a technique to identify and determine data dependencies between service protocols. Protocols evolving concurrently in the service composition need to impose an order in their execution if there exist data dependencies. In this work, we describe a model to formalise context-aware service protocols. We also present a composition language to handle dynamically the concurrent execution of protocols. This language addresses data dependency issues among several protocols concurrently executed on the same user device, using mechanisms based on data semantic matching. Our approach aims at assisting the user in establishing priorities between these dependencies, avoiding the occurrence of deadlock situations. Nevertheless, this process is error-prone, since it requires human intervention. Therefore, we also propose verification techniques to automatically detect possible inconsistencies specified by the user while building the data dependency set. Our approach is supported by a prototype tool we have implemented.