An Operating Guideline Approach to the SOA

Abstract

Interorganizational cooperation is more and more organized by the paradigm of services. The service-oriented architecture (SOA) provides a general framework for service interaction. It describes three roles, service provider, service requester, and service broker, together with the three operations publish, find, and bind. We provide a formal method based on Petri nets to model services and their cooperation. We characterize well-behaving pairs of requester’s and provider’s services and suggest operating guidelines as a convenient and intuitive artifact to realize publish. Then, the find operation reduces to a matching problem between the requester’s service and the operating guideline. Binding of a requester’s and a provider’s service is therefore guaranteed to result in a well-behaving cooperating service.