A theory of contracts for strong service compliance

Abstract

We investigate, in a process algebraic setting, a new notion of correctness for service compositions, which we call strong service compliance : composed services are strong compliant if their composition is both deadlock and livelock free (this is the traditional notion of compliance), and whenever a message can be sent to invoke a service, it is guranteed to be ready to serve the invocation. We also define a new notion of refinement, called strong subcontract pre-order , suitable for strong compliance: given a composition of strong compliant services, we can replace any service with any other service in subcontract relation while preserving the overall strong compliance. Finally, we present a characterisation of the strong subcontract pre-order by resorting to the theory of a (should) testing pre-order.