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.
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.
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