Deciding whether a service S can be substituted by another service S is an important problem in practice and one of the research challenges in service-oriented computing. In this paper, we define three substitutability notions for services. Accordance specifies that S cooperates with at least the environments that S cooperates with. S and S are equivalent if they cooperate with the same environments. To guarantee that S cooperates with a fixed subset of environments that S cooperates with, the notion of deprecation can be used. For each substitutability notion we present a decision algorithm. To this end we apply the concept of an operating guideline of a service as an abstract representation of all environments the service cooperates with.
The recent success of service-oriented architectures gives rise to some fundamental questions: To what extent do services constitute a new paradigm of computation? What are the elementary ingredients of this paradigm? What are adequate notions of semantics, composition, equivalence? How can services be modeled and analyzed? This paper addresses and answers those questions, thus preparing the ground for forthcoming software design techniques.
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