On the Formalisation of an Application Integration Language Using Z Notation

Companies rely on applications in their software ecosystem to provide IT support for their business processes. It is common that these applications were not designed taking integration into account, which makes hard their reuse. Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) focuses on the design and implementation of integration solutions. The demand for integration has motivated the rapid growing of tools to support the construction of EAI solutions. Guarana is a proposal that can be used to design and implement EAI solutions, and different from other proposals includes a monitoring system that can be configured using a rule-based language to endow solutions with fault-tolerance. Although Guarana is available, it has not been formalised yet. This is a limitation since it is not possible to validate the rules written by software engineers, using the rule-based language, to ensure that all possibilities of failure in a given EAI solution are covered. Besides, it is not possible to generate automatically these rules based on the semantics of the EAI solution. In this paper we provide a formal specification of the language provided by Guarana to design EAI solutions, using Z notation.

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