Assessment of Service Protocol Adaptability Based on Novel Walk Computation

In recent years, we witness the increasing trend that more applications are developed by composing Web services. Services interact with each other in ways not necessarily foreseen during their development phase. In this setting, mismatches usually exist between services, and adapters are typically synthesized to reconcile mismatches occurring in certain interactions. The technique that identifies the most suitable provider service from a set of functionally equivalent candidates with respect to certain requirements specified by the requester is essential. To address this challenge, we propose a technique called adaptability assessment , which 1) provides a set of conditions that determines when service interactions can be conducted and 2) computes an adaptation degree that specifies to what extent a service protocol is adaptable to another service protocol. Adaptability assessment complements the techniques that synthesize adapters. Specifically, when adaptability assessment suggests that two service protocols can conduct some interactions according to the adaptation mechanisms of a certain adapter and these interactions can fulfill the requester´s requirements, then the effort of synthesizing an adapter is beneficial to potential service interactions. As such, the requester can acknowledge whether his/her expected interactions can be conducted or not and under which conditions. This is important before conducting an interaction, particularly when this interaction is critical, long running, and nonrepeatable.