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Timed service contract automata

  • S.I. : VeCoS 2018
  • Published:
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Abstract

We equip a recently developed model for the specification of service contracts with real-time constraints. Service contracts offer a means to define the behavioural compliance of a composition of services, typically dictated in a service-level agreement (SLA), as the fulfilment of all service requests through service offers. Depending on their granularity, SLAs vary according to the level of criticality of the involved services and also contain real-time aspects, like the services’ response or expiration time. A standard method to refine a spurious service composition into a compliant one is via the synthesis of a safe orchestration, in the form of the most permissive controller from supervisory control theory. Ideally, safe orchestrations solve competition among matching service requests and offers, in light of their criticalities and their timing constraints, in the best possible way. In this paper, we introduce timed service contract automata as a novel formal model for service contracts with real-time constraints on top of services with varying levels of criticality. We also define a means to efficiently compute their composition and their safe orchestration, using the concept of zones from timed games. The innovations of our contribution are illustrated by intuitive examples and by a preliminary evaluation.

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Notes

  1. Our (service) contract automata are not to be confused with the homonym contract automata of [3], cf. the related work discussed below.

  2. In this paper, there are no examples of greedy necessary actions.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Louis-Marie Traonouez for his contribution to this paper’s conference publication. We would also like to thank the audience at VECoS 2019 for interesting questions and comments, which have led to the introduction of state invariants in our formalism, as presented in this paper. Finally, we would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for comments and suggestions that have improved the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Università degli Studi di Firenze, Florence, Italy

    Davide Basile

  2. ISTI–CNR, Pisa, Italy

    Davide Basile & Maurice H. ter Beek

  3. Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

    Axel Legay

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  1. Davide Basile
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Correspondence to Davide Basile.

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Basile, D., ter Beek, M.H. & Legay, A. Timed service contract automata. Innovations Syst Softw Eng 16, 199–214 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11334-019-00353-3

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