On interoperability and conformance assessment in service composition

The process of composing a service from other services typically involves multiple models. These models may represent the service from distinct perspectives, e.g., to model the different roles of systems involved in the service, and at distinct abstraction levels, e.g., to model the service’s capability, interface or the orchestration that implements the service. The consistency among these models needs to be maintained in order to guarantee the correctness of the composition process. Two types of consistency relations are distinguished: interoperability, which concerns the ability of different roles to interoperate, and conformance, which concerns the correct implementation of an abstract model by a more concrete model. This paper discusses the need for and use of techniques to assess interoperability and conformance in a service composition process. The paper shows how these consistency relations can be described and analysed using concepts from the COSMO framework. Examples are presented to illustrate how interoperability and conformance can be assessed.