Matching Nondeterministic Services with Operating Guidelines

Interorganizational cooperation is more and more organized by the paradigm of services. The service-oriented architecture (SOA) provides a general framework for service interaction. It describes three roles, service provider, service requester, and service broker, together with the operations publish, find, and bind. We provide a formal method based on nondeterministic automata to model services and their interaction. We suggest operating guidelines as a convenient and intuitive artifact to realize publish. In our approach, the find operation reduces to a matching problem between the requester’s service and operating guidelines. In this paper, matching of deterministic as well as nondeterministic automata with operating guidelines is presented.