A Runtime Environment for Contract Automata

TL;DR

This paper introduces CARE, a runtime environment that ensures service implementations adhere to specified behavioral contracts, facilitating reliable contract-based application realization with formal guarantees and demonstrated benefits.

Contribution

The paper presents CARE, a novel runtime environment for coordinating services based on contract automata, with formal guarantees and practical adoption insights.

Findings

CARE guarantees adherence to contracts in service coordination

Experiments show improved reliability over manual implementations

CARE facilitates formal verification of contract compliance

Abstract

Contract automata have been introduced for specifying applications through behavioural contracts and for synthesising their orchestrations as finite state automata. This paper addresses the realisation of applications from contract automata specifications. We present CARE, a new runtime environment to coordinate services implementing contracts that guarantees the adherence of the implementation to its contract. We discuss how CARE can be adopted to realise contract-based applications, its formal guarantees, and we identify the responsibilities of the involved business actors. Experiments show the benefits of adopting CARE with respect to manual implementations.