Agent Societies and Service Choreographies: a Declarative Approach to Specification and Verification

The need for specifying choreographies when developing service oriented systems recently arose as an important issue. Although declarativeness has been identified as a key feature, several proposed approaches model choreographies by focusing on procedural aspects, e.g. by specifying control and message flows of the interacting services. A similar issue has been addressed in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), where declarative approaches based on social semantics have been used to capture the nature of agents interaction without over-constraining their behavior. In this paper we show how DecSerFlow can be mapped to SCIFF in an automatic and complete way. DecSerFlow is a graphical language capable to model in an intuitive and declarative fashion service flows, whereas SCIFF is a framework based on abductive logic programming originally developed for dealing with social interactions in MAS. By means of a running example, we show how the conjunct use of both approaches could be fruitfully exploited to declaratively specify and verify service choreographies.