Associated team FOSSA

The widespread deployment of networked applications and adoption of the internet has fostered an environment in which many distributed services are available. There is great demand to automate business processes and workflows among organizations and individuals. Solutions to such problems require orchestration or choreography of concurrent and distributed services in the face of arbitrary delays and failures of components and communication. The Orc team, lead by Jayadev Misra at the University of Texas at Austin, has developed the Orc language to support orchestrations. The DistribCom team has developed studies regarding the Quality of Services of orchestrations and choreographies, with emphasis on Orc. Finally, the newly created MExICo team in Saclay has participated in the above research. The teams cooperate since 2006 and have decided to join their efforts in lauching the associated team FOSSA, with the following objectives:

• To contribute to the development of Orc as a support for Structured Application Development over Wide-Area Networks;
• To develop a comprehensive theory of QoS for composite Web services, supporting: SLA contracts, contract composition, contract monitoring, and reconfiguration;
• To experiment on real orchestrations or choreographies;
• To develop studies on security (Authorization and Information flow);
• To develop studies on the functional synthesis and design of composite services, including mashups ("à la Hop") and synthesis of adaptors for services inside a composition;
• To develop the synthesis of clients supporting the interaction protocol of a composite service;
• To benchmark different styles of formalisms: Orc, a graphical formalism for workflow specifications by Gero Decker (Signavio), and Active XML document based formalism.