Foundational Aspects of Service Discovery based on Behavioural Contracts

In the context of Service Oriented Computing behavioural contracts are descriptions of the observable message-passing behavior of services. In other terms, contracts are behavioural interfaces that can be used, for instance, to check whether a group of services can be safely combined avoiding, e.g., undesired deadlocks. In this paper we consider the problem of discovering available services that can be used to implement a given service system. The idea is to first design a service system by describing the overall behaviour of each of its participant, and then instantiate such participants retrieving services exposing a behavioural contract which is conformant with the corresponding given behaviour.