The application of service oriented architecture enables business organizations to collaborate in an agile, just-in-time fashion using loosely coupled services. To ensure interoperability of interacting services, behavioral mismatches between their protocols need to be resolved in a fast and efficient way, which can be accomplished with protocol adaptors. We present an efficient, automated method to synthesize minimal protocol adaptors that resolve behavioral mismatches between asynchronously communicating business protocols. A minimal adaptor only processes those messages that cause the mismatch and has less message overhead at run-time than a non-minimal adaptor. If no adaptor can be synthesized, the method gives feedback on which parts of the protocols need to change to make the protocols adaptable. We show that the proposed method increases the efficiency of state-of-the-art service adaptation both at run-time and design-time. Moreover, the synthesized adaptors are more robust to changes in the input protocols than adaptors constructed with existing protocol adaptation approaches.

Business chains increasingly rely on the dynamic integration of business processes of different partners. The interaction constraints that result from the business processes are captured in business protocols. Since the business protocols of each partner support its own way of working, the business protocols can easily mismatch, which hinders organizations from forming a business chain. Such mismatches can be resolved by protocol adaptors. In this paper, we show how protocol adaptors can be used to enable the flexible formation of business chains. For different types of business chains, we present formation cases that describe which partners are responsible for the construction and operation of protocol adaptors. Next, we present for each formation case an accompanying concrete software architecture that realizes the case. The presented software architectures support the flexible formation of business chains and use protocol adaptation as a key component. We show the feasibility of the approach by discussing a prototype implementation, which we apply to a case study from the healthcare domain.

In dynamic e-business, organizations collaborate in a just-in-time fashion using loosely coupled services. To ensure interoperability of the services, behavioral mismatches between their protocols need to be resolved in a fast and efficient way, which can be done with protocol adaptors. We present an efficient, automated method to construct (if possible) a minimal protocol adaptor with parallelism for two asynchronously communicating business protocols. A minimal adaptor only processes those messages that cause the mismatch, and has less message overhead at run-time than a non-minimal adaptor. Existing methods only build adaptors that are sequential, synchronous, or non-minimal. We show that the proposed method increases the efficiency of service adaption both at run-time and design-time.