Towards Service-Based Systems Engineering: Formalizing and μ-Checking Service Descriptions

Using graphical description techniques for the modeling of distributed reactive systems is especially useful in the early phases like requirements engineering. There, often a trial-and-error approach is applied to develop a first system specification. Thus, even there a precise meaning of those description techniques is necessary to check for consistency and completeness of a service-oriented description of the requirements. We introduce a formal semantics for the scenario-based graphical language Chisel. We show how this formalization can be directly applied to model checking service specifications without the need for an explicit operational system model thus supporting the development of complete and consistent service descriptions.