Establishing Conformance between Contracts and Choreographies

Abstract

In a business-to-business collaborative setting, a choreography and a business contract (service agreement) are two specifications that describe permissible interactions between partners from different view points, emphasising different aspects. A choreography specification is a description, from a global perspective, of all permissible message exchange sequences between the partners. A business contract on the other hand specifies what operations the business partners have the rights, obligations or prohibitions to execute; it also stipulates when the operations are to be executed and in which order. It is naturally important to make sure that message exchanges as encoded in a given choreography conform to (are in accordance with) the contract between the partners. In other words, make sure that any message interaction permitted in the choreography will not cause a breach of the contract. The paper develops the concept of conformance between a contract and a choreography assuming that they can be modelled by Finite Automata. This approach opens the way for automatically establishing conformance by using model checking techniques.

A survey of challenges for runtime verification from advanced application domains (beyond software)

“…There have been several interpretations and approaches for the development of such a logic [260], including modal extensions of logics and automata in order to address the issue of how contracts can be formalized and reasoned about. See, for example [37,89,172,232,246,275,276,330], just to mention a few. 8 Why is there a need for a logic or some other formal language?…”

Verifying Service Choreography Model Based on Description Logic

“…The method maps the service composition model to a finite state process (FSP), aiming at verifying the compatibility between composite services and their environment by using a labeled transition system analyzer (LTSA). Molina-Jimenez and Shrivastava [52] developed the concept of conformance between a contract and a choreography by assuming that they can be modeled by Finite Automaton (FA). The choreography specifications and contracts, specified by the BPMN notation and the event-condition-action rules, describe permissible interactions between partners from different viewpoints.…”

A Tool for the Automatic Verification of BPMN Choreographies

“…Channels: are the communication medium and declared as local or global by the keyword chan. For example, chan Buyer2Store= [2] of {req} declares a channel that can store up to two messages of type req. Variables: can be declared as local or global.…”

“…Current industrial practice makes use of contracts implicitly in designing choreographies. The idea of explicitly using contracts in deriving choreographies and/or business processes of partners is a topic of ongoing research [1] [2]. Fig.…”