Service specification and matching based on graph transformation

One of the main tasks of modern application integration projects is to allow one business unit (requestor) to use services offered by another business unit (provider). When software systems of business partners are composed, an import interface of the requestor system is connected to an export interface of the provider system. Here, the import interface specification containing the requestor’s requirements for a needed service has to be matched against the export interface specification describing the provided service. Usually, software engineers carry out matching of interface specifications manually; it makes the design and implementation of composite software expensive and error-prone. Therefore, the demand for instruments that would automate the matching procedure is high. In this thesis, we develop a new technique facilitating integration of software systems. To this end, we solve a problem of how to construct visual and formal interface specifications comprising semantic descriptions. Our method also includes a matching procedure that checks compatibility of such specifications. Interface specifications consist of structural and behavioral compartments. The structural compartment, given by a signature analogous to those appearing in algebraic specifications, defines operation declarations. The behavioral compartment, modeled by a conditional graph transformation system (GTS), contains operation contracts in the form of graph transformation rules. The rules of conditional GTS are equipped with loose semantics to describe operations in the import interface, and with strict semantics to describe those in the export interface. Composition of two compartments leads to an integral interface specification which is represented by the novel concept of parameterized conditional GTS. We develop three kinds of compatibility relations underlying the matching procedure. The intended correspondence between declarations and contracts of the required and provided operations is reflected by structural and behavioral compatibility relations which are established over the corresponding compartments of interface specifi-