A formal framework for coordinated simulation of heterogeneous service-oriented applications

Early design and validation of service-oriented applications is hardly feasible due to their distributed, dynamic, and heterogeneous nature. In order to support the engineering of such applications and discover faults early, foundational theories, modeling notations and analysis techniques for component-based development should be revisited. This paper presents a formal framework for coordinated execution of serviceoriented applications based on the OSOA open standard Service Component Architecture (SCA) for heterogeneous service assembly and on the formal method Abstract State Machines (ASMs) for modeling notions of service behavior, interactions, and orchestration in an abstract but executable way. The proposed framework is exemplifed through a Robotics Task Coordination case study of the EU project BRICS.