Operating Guidelines for Finite-State Services

Abstract

We introduce the concept of an operating guideline for an arbitrary finite-state service P, extending the work of [1, 2] which was restricted to acyclic services. An operating guideline gives complete information about how to correctly (in this paper: deadlock-free) communicate with P. It can further be executed or used for service discovery. An operating guideline for P is a particular service S that is enriched with annotations. S communicates deadlock-free with P and is able to simulate every other service that communicates deadlock-free with P. The attached annotations give complete information about whether or not a simulated service is deadlock-free, too.