Towards a Unifying Theory for Choreography Conformance and Contract Compliance

In the context of Service Oriented Computing, contracts are descriptions of the externally observable behaviour of services. Given a group of collaborating services, their contracts can be used to verify whether their composition is sound, i.e., the services are compliant. In this paper, we relate the theory of contracts with the notion of choreography conformance, used to check whether an aggregation of services correctly behaves according to a high level specification of their possible conversations. The main result of this paper is the definition of an effective procedure that can be used to verify whether a service with a given contract can correctly play a specific role within a choreography. This procedure is achieved via composition of choreography projection and contract refinement.