Deciding substitutability of services with operating guidelines

Deciding whether a service S can be substituted by another service S' is an important problem in practice and one of the research challenges in service-oriented computing. In this paper, we define three substitutability notions for services. Accordance specifies that S' cooperates with at least the environments that S cooperates with. S and S' are equivalent if they cooperate with the same environments. To guarantee that S' cooperates with a fixed subset of environments that S cooperates with, the notion of restriction can be used. For each substitutability notion we present a decision algorithm. To this end we apply the concept of an operating guideline of a service as an abstract representation of all environments the service cooperates with