Assessment of service protocols adaptability using a novel path computation technique

Abstract

In this paper we propose a new kind of adaptability assessment that determines whether service protocols of a requestor and a provider are adaptable, computes their adaptation degree, and identifies conditions that determine when they can be adapted. We also propose a technique that implements this adaptability assessment: (1) we construct a complete adaptation graph that captures all service interactions adaptable between these two service protocols. The emptiness or non-emptiness of this graph corresponds to the fact that whether or not they are adaptable; (2) we propose a novel path computation technique to generate all instance sub-protocols which reflect valid executions of a particular service protocol, and to derive all instance sub-protocol pairs captured by the complete adaptation graph. An adaptation degree is computed as a ratio between the number of instance sub-protocols captured by these instance sub-protocol pairs with respect to a service protocol and that of this service protocol; (3) and finally we identify a set of conditions based on these instance sub-protocol pairs. A condition is the conjunction of all conditions specified on the transitions of a given pair of instance sub-protocols. This assessment is a comprehensive means of selecting the suitable service protocol among functionally-equivalent candidates according to the requestor's business requirements. © Springer-Verlag 2009.