Towards a Formal Model for Agile Service Discovery and Integration
Hagen Overdick, Frank Puhlmann, Mathias Weske, Mathias Weske · 2005
Abstract. As the fundamental web services technologies are becoming mature, web service composition, orchestration and choreography are gaining increasing attention. The movement from static interactions be-tween already known partners as in BPEL to dynamically discovered and agile business partners is irresistible facing ever changing environ-ments while aiming for specifically optimized collaborations. However, the techniques and models currently used lack fundamental formal foun-dations making them inadequate especially for modeling non-functional aspects. As a step toward the vision of dynamically discovered and ag-ile processes, this paper proposes a formal approach to unambiguously define the syntax of service orchestrations and choreographies by repre-senting key elements of service–oriented computing in a process algebra, the pi-calculus. The results include a formal description of correlations in the context of service choreography as well as a formal representation of an orchestration pattern derived from BPMN and BPEL. The results provide a better understanding of service-based processes in terms of a formal algebra that will open the door for automated discovery and bind-ing of potential business partners via service equivalence and mobility. 1