Automatic Generation of Adaptation Contracts

Software development based on the composition of black-box software like Web Services and Software Components is impeded by incompatibilities in their interfaces. Software adaptation has emerged as a solution to these incompatibilities by using processes in-the-middle (called adapters) that allow the correct interaction between the services. There are several approaches that focused on the automated generation of adapters guided by adaptation contracts which specify how the incompatibilities can be resolved. However, the generation of these contracts is not automated and most existing approaches require these contracts to be specified by hand, which obliges the designer to know all the service details. In this paper, we propose an approach to automatically generate adaptation contracts from the behavioral description of the services. These contracts overcome incompatibilities at signature and behavioral levels. Finally we present our prototype tool that accepts as input the service behaviors written in abstract BPEL and generates adaptation contracts using a combination of an A* algorithm and an expert system.