Business processes that span organizational borders describe the interaction between multiple parties working towards a common objective. They also express business rules that govern the behavior of the process and account for expressing changes reflecting new business objectives and new market situations. In our previous work we developed a service request language and support framework that allow users to formulate their requests against standard business processes. In this paper we extend this approach by presenting a framework capable of automatically associating business rules with relevant processes involved in a user request. This framework plans and monitors the execution of the request against services underlying these processes. Definitions and classifications of business rules (named assertions in the paper) are given together with an assertion language for expressing them. The framework is able to handle the non-determinism typical for service-oriented computing environments and it is based on the interleaving of planning and execution.

Abstract. The greater and greater quantity of services that are available over the web causes a growing attention to techniques that facilitate their reuse. A web service specification can be quite complex, including various operations and message exchange patterns. In this work, we focus on the problem of retrieving a web service, which can play a given choreography role, preserving at the same time a condition of interest (the goal for which the service is sought). We show that current semantic matchmaking techniques do not guarantee goal preservation. We also show an approach for overcoming these limits, which exploits the choreography definition. This work is based on an action-based representation of the operations of a service: each operation is described in terms of its preconditions and effects, without taking into account the ontology layer which is not functional to the aims of the work.

Service-based software systems are a useful concept recently developed to support the development of systems offering functions (the so-called services) which may be interrelated or may mutually depend on each other. Although appealing from a practical point of view, the development of service-based software for security-critical systems is, unfortunately, not well understood. Services may easily interact with each other in a way which may have unforeseen consequences on the various security properties provided. In this work, we propose a method for facilitating the development of security-critical service-based software systems using the computer-aided systems engineering tool AutoFocus based on the formal method Focus. We explain our method at the example of a service-based system from the automotive domain.

We propose a specification-driven approach to Web service composition. Our framework allows the users (or service developers) to start with a high-level, possibly incomplete specification of a desired (goal) service that is to be realized using a subset of the available component services. These services are represented using labeled transition systems augmented with guards over variables with infinite domains and are used to determine a strategy for their composition that would realize the goal service functionality. However, in the event the goal service cannot be realized using the available services, our approach identifies the cause(s) for such failure which can then be used by the developer to reformulate the goal specification. Thus, the technique supports Web service composition through iterative reformulation of the functional specification. We present a prototype implementation in a tabled-logic programming environment that illustrates the key features of the proposed approach. Keywords: Service-oriented architectures; web services; composition; symbolic transition systems; tabled-logic programming. 109 110 J. Pathak et al. 1.

When Web services are composed, transactions are needed to maintain the consistency of the distributed data in all but the most trivial cases. Today’s Web service transaction specifications still leave some issues unresolved, e.g., the specification of quality of service aspects. Therefore, we propose a modeling methodology that forces the software architect to address such issues at an early stage of development. The methodology is divided into four layers of UML diagrams which reference each other: structure, transactions, security, and workflow. This separation of concerns can also be used to incorporate the knowledge of several experts into the design. 1.

Abstract. The development of composite Web services is still not as simple as the original vision indicated. Currently, the designer of a composite service needs to consider many different design aspects at once. In this paper, we propose a modeling methodology based on UML which separates between the four concerns of structure, transactions, workflow, and security, each of which can be modeled by different experts. We have developed a proof-of-concept tool that is able to extract information from the model and transform it into a computer-readable format. 1

Abstract. In this work we give a formal background and identify the limits of applicability of local matching criteria (among which the wellknown Zaremski and Wings’s plugin-match) when they are used to automatically retrieve all the capabilities that are necessary to instantiate a given choreography. In doing this it is necessary to take into account and somehow merge two possibly conflicting perspectives: the local criterion for selecting single capabilities and the overall goal that we mean the composition to pursue. Formally, the problem is interpreted as the study of the preservation of the global properties of a choreography, when its roles are played by specific services. 1

Abstract. Deployment and customization of the software in different information systems of separate organizations challenge large requirement conformity, project and specification management, design and architecture complexity, code integration, compatibility and interoperability issues, frequently causing the need of reengineering through the entire all the system development lifecycle. The paper proposes new business rule based method of information system configuration management and automated way of configuration implementation into the final software system code. 1

Service composition has become an important paradigm for building distributed applications and e-business processes. While effort has been reported to verify a posteriori whether a given composition such as a BPEL schema satisfies the predefined behavioural properties, little effort has been made to utilise the properties to assist the designer in developing a correct service composition in the first place. This paper reports our first attempt towards this goal by presenting a framework and associated techniques to provide automated guidance to the designer during the composition design process. The guidance can be suggestions on the next valid steps in the business process, identifications of missing/misplaced steps, and/or propositions for inserting, deleting or reordering activities. The guidance is provided based on the temporal business rules which state the temporal/sequential relationships between business activities. 1.

The development of service oriented applications very often needs to address the problem of satisfying two conflicting kinds of business needs: global business requirements, i.e., the regulations that dictate the rules of engagement between different organizations, and local business requirements, i.e., the rules local to each involved partner which derive from its internal business needs. In this paper, we propose a development process where both global and local service requirements, as well as their behaviors, are incrementally agreed among partners and built through negotiation steps. The development process is supported by the explicit definition of both global and local requirements at different levels of abstraction. We express requirements in a language with a clear semantics, and which allows for explicit links to executable business processes, e.g., written in BPEL4WS. This development process opens up the possibility to adopt a variety of supporting techniques. In particular, automated verification is used to detect design or implementation problems. Automated synthesis of executable business processes allows for a speed up in the development process and reduces development effort. Finally, execution monitoring is able to detect run-time problems with respect to specified requirements. 1.