Contracts for Abstract Processes in Service Composition

TL;DR

This paper extends contract theory for web service compositions by formalizing abstraction as an extension of symbolic bisimulation, enabling partial behavioral descriptions to ensure compatibility.

Contribution

It introduces a formal characterization of abstraction within contract theory, allowing partial process descriptions to be effectively analyzed for compatibility.

Findings

Formalization of abstraction as an extension of symbolic bisimulation

Recovery of abstraction notion in the context of contracts

Enhanced analysis of partial behavioral descriptions

Abstract

Contracts are a well-established approach for describing and analyzing behavioral aspects of web service compositions. The theory of contracts comes equipped with a notion of compatibility between clients and servers that ensures that every possible interaction between compatible clients and servers will complete successfully. It is generally agreed that real applications often require the ability of exposing just partial descriptions of their behaviors, which are usually known as abstract processes. We propose a formal characterization of abstraction as an extension of the usual symbolic bisimulation and we recover the notion of abstraction in the context of contracts.