We study services modeled as
open workflow nets (oWFN) and describe their behavior as
service automata. Based on arbitrary finite-state service automata, we introduce the concept of an
operating guideline, generalizing the work of [1,2] which was restricted to acyclic services.
An operating guideline gives complete information about how to properly interact (in this paper: deadlock-freely and with
limited communication) with an oWFN N. It can be executed, thus forming a properly interacting partner of N, or it can be used to support service discovery.
An operating guideline for
N is a particular service automaton
S that is enriched with Boolean annotations.
S interacts properly with the service automaton
Prov\mathit{Prov}
, representing the behavior of
N, and is able to simulate every other service that interacts properly with
Prov\mathit{Prov}
. The attached annotations give complete information about whether or not a simulated service interacts properly with
Prov\mathit{Prov}
, too.
Partially funded by the BMBF project “Tools4BPEL”.