History Dependent Automata for Service Oriented Computing


FUNDING: The Nuffield Foundation Awards to Newly Appointed Lecturers, GPB 5,000
DURATION: May 2006 - April 2008
SUMMARY: Nominal calculi are moving toward "service" calculi where the emphasis is on publishing, searching, binding and invoking services. This will likely lead to extend existing calculi with sophisticated searching mechanisms where queries contain semantic (rather than simply "syntactic") information. HiDea4SOC will exploit History Dependent automata in the search phase. The idea is to specify behavioural aspects of services along with their interfaces so that searching will be driven by exploiting the information about the behaviour of searched services. HD-automata will be used to check the equivalence between the behaviour specified in the search query and that of the searched service. The outcome of HiDeA4SOC will be a framework that can uniformly verify searching conditions. More precisely, a query might specify the preferred behavioural equivalence to be used rather than simply the preferred behaviour. An innovative feature of HiDeA4SOC is the possibility of specifying the notion of behavioural equivalence in the search query. For instance, it will be possible to express verify conditions like "a service that is equivalent to a behaviour B under testing equivalence".