Architecture and behaviour analysis for engineering Service Modes

Engineering services in the framework of an service-oriented architecture (SOA) is complex and open to mistakes if a rigorous approach is not taken. Combining SOA with features to support dynamic service discovery, management and binding, increase the chances that an architecture configuration has been incorrectly specified. To facilitate service engineers designing and implementing service systems we introduced the notion of service modes, that at design time provide an abstraction of service configurations given particular requirements for runtime. This paper describes how behaviour protocols are included in these configurations and how properties of combined architecture and behaviour models can be used to perform some useful analysis to assure dynamic service architecture configurations are safer and more resilient to incompatibilities. The modelling and analysis techniques are supported by an implementation in the LTSA WS-Engineer, a comprehensive integrated tool suite for verification and validation of service compositions.