Compact Representations and Efficient Algorithms for Operating Guidelines

Operating guidelines characterize correct interaction (e. g., deadlock freedom) with a service. They can be stored in a service registry. They are typically represented as an annotated transition system where the annotations are Boolean formulae attached to the states. The core result of this article is to propose an alternative representation of operating guidelines where, instead of a Boolean formula, only a few bits need to be stored with a state. This way, we safe one order of magnitude in the space complexity of the representation. Moreover, we demonstrate that the new representation yields efficiency gains in several algorithms which involve operating guidelines. Finally we show that the new representation permits the translation of the transition system representing the operating guidelines into a Petri net which typically yields further gains concerning the space for storing operating guidelines.