A formal semantics for supporting the automated synthesis of choreography-based architectures

Abstract

Nowadays, we are surrounded by a rapidly increasing number of software applications that provide different services in various domains. To fulfill the needs of this new reality, software systems are often built by reusing and integrating existing services distributed over the Internet, and thus promoting a reuse-based software production. Service Choreography is a decentralized service engineering approach to compose and coordinate existing services from a global perspective, in terms of peer-to-peer message exchanges. The current standard de-facto for modeling such choreographies are the BPMN2 Choreography Diagrams. However, BPMN2 specifications lack formal semantics which cause some misinterpretations by practitioners and researchers. Colored Petri Nets (CPN) have been used to model, analyse and simulate various types of systems, in particular distributed ones. Nonetheless, CPN is a formally proved notation with mathematical semantics and tool support. Following an approach similar to [2], this paper first proposes the definition of a rigorous mapping between BPMN2 Choreography Diagrams and CPN-based models. Then, a component-connector architectural style suitable for automated choreography realizability enforcement is proposed, where the devised CPN-based models are used to express the interaction behavior of the represented components and connectors, hence enabling automated reasoning.