Guaranteeing Weak Termination in Service Discovery

Abstract

A big issue in the paradigm of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) is service discovery. Organizations publish their services via the Internet. These published services can then be automatically found and accessed by other services, meaning, the services are composed. A fundamental property of a service composition is weak termination, which guarantees the absence of deadlocks and livelocks. In principle, weak termination can be verified by inspecting the state space of the composition of (public views of) the involved services. We propose a methodology to build that state space from precomputed fragments, which are computed upon publishing a service. That way, we shift computation effort from the resource critical “find” phase to the less critical “publish” phase. Interestingly, our setting enables state space reduction methods that are intrinsically different from traditional state space reductions. We further show the positive impact of our approach to the computational effort of service discovery.