Modeling and Reasoning about Service-Oriented Applications via Goals and Commitments

Service-oriented applications facilitate the exchange of business services among autonomous and heterogeneous participants. Traditional system modeling approaches either apply at a lower of abstraction than required for such applications or do not accommodate the autonomous and heterogeneous nature of the participants. We present a business-level conceptual model that addresses the above shortcomings. The model gives primacy to the participants in a service-oriented application. A key feature of the model is that it cleanly decouples the specification of an application's architecture from the specification of individual participants. We formalize the connection between the two---the reasoning that would help a participant decide if a specific application is suitable for his needs. We implement the reasoning in datalog and apply it to a case study involving car insurance. We also demonstrate the scalability of our approach.