Service Protocol Replaceability Assessment in Mediated Service Interactions

In this paper we propose a technique called replaceability assessment where, according to the adaptation mechanisms of a certain adapter, it provides a set of condition pairs that determine when one protocol can be replaced by another, and computes a replacement degree that specifies how replaceable two protocols are. The set of condition pairs and the replacement degree are complementary criteria to be used by the requestor for identifying the most suitable provider service from a set of functionally equivalent candidates.