Advancing orchestration synthesis for contract automata

Abstract

Contract automata allow to formally define the behaviour of service contracts in terms of service offers and requests, some of which are moreover optional and some of which are necessary. A composition of contracts is said to be in agreement if all service requests are matched by corresponding offers. Whenever a composition of contracts is not in agreement, it can be refined to reach an agreement using the orchestration synthesis algorithm. This algorithm is a variant of the synthesis algorithm used in supervisory control theory and it is based on the fact that optional transitions are controllable, whereas necessary transitions are at most semi-controllable and cannot always be controlled. In this paper, we present advancements of the orchestration synthesis for contract automata. Notably, we identify the existing limits of the orchestration synthesis and propose a novel orchestration synthesis along with additional constructs to enhance the expressiveness and scalability of contract automata. The proposed advancements have been implemented and experimented on two case studies, one of which originates from the railway domain and the other is a card game.