Behavioral Consistency for B2B Process Integration

Interacting services are at the center of attention in business-to-business (B2B) process integration scenarios. Global interaction models specify the interaction behavior of each service and serve as contractual basis for the collaboration. Consequently, service implementations have to be consistent with the specifications. Consistency checking ensures that an implemented service is compatible with other services, i.e. that it can interact successfully with them. This is important in order to avoid deadlocks and guarantee proper termination of a collaboration. Different notions of compatibility between interacting services and consistency between specification and implementation are available but they are typically discussed independently from each other. This paper presents a unifying framework for compatibility and consistency and shows how these two notions relate to one another. Criteria for an optimal consistency relation with respect to a given compatibility relation are presented. Based on these criteria weak bi-simulation is evaluated.