An Algorithm for Matching Nondeterministic Services with Operating Guidelines

Abstract

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.