Requirements-Driven Adaptation of Choreographed Interactions

Abstract

Electronic services are emerging as the de-facto enabler of interaction interoperability across organization boundaries. Cross-organizational interactions are often “choreographed”, i.e. specified by a messaging protocol from a global point of view independent of the local view of each interacting organization. Local requirements motivating an interaction as well as the global contextual requirements governing the interaction inevitably evolve over time, requiring adaptation of the corresponding interaction protocol. Adaptation of an interaction protocol must ensure the satisfaction of both sets of interaction requirements while maintaining consistency between the global view and the local views of an interaction specification. Such adaptation is not possible with the current state-of-the-art representations of choreographed interactions, as they capture only operational messaging specifications detached from both local organizational requirements as well as global contextual requirements. This thesis presents three novel contributions that tackle adaptation of choreographed interaction protocols: an automated technique for deriving an interaction protocol from requirements, a formalization of consistency between local and global views, and a framework for guiding the adaptation of a choreographed interaction. A choreographed interaction is specified using models of organizational requirements motivating the interaction. We employ the formal semantics embedded in requirements models to automatically derive an interaction protocol. We propose a framework for relating the global and local views of interaction specification and maintaining consistency between them. We develop a metamodel for interaction specification, from which we enumerate adaptation operations. We build a catalogue that provides guidance on performing each operation and propagating changes between the global and local views. These contributions are evaluated using examples from the literature as well as a real-world case study.