Assessing Service Protocols Adaptability Using Protocol Reduction and Graph-Search with Backtracking Techniques

摘要

Adaptation between service protocols is an important functionality for ensuring proper service interactions. Previous work focused mainly on either compatibility analysis targeting the direct service interaction, or adapter construction for resolving mismatches. In this paper we propose a new kind of adaptability assessment that decides whether service protocols of a requestor and a provider are adaptable, computes their adaptation degree, and identifies conditions that determine when they can be adapted. We also propose a technique to implement this adaptability assessment: we first reduce a service protocol into an abstracted service protocol through proposed reduction rules, based on which, we then construct an adaptation matrix using an adapted depth-first search with backtracking technique. Based on this matrix, we compute the adaptation degree and identify necessary conditions. This assessment provides a key criterion to the requestor for selecting the most suitable service protocol from functionally-equivalent candidates according to her business requirements.