In SOC it is important to precisely ascertain which participants are entitled to receive messages. The set of such participants can be abstracted as a session. For instance, a travel booking service has to serve many requests concurrently; this can be represented as a set of sessions each involving (an instance of) the booking service and a client. It must be guaranteed that it never happens that a confirmation for a client is received by another one. Moreover, service-oriented applications feature interactions among several distributed participants, namely protocols often require more participants to be able to correctly
interact.

 

The main engineering approaches studied in SENSORIA for such complex interactions are based on correlation sets and sessions:

• Correlations: the participants to a session are determined by correlation values explicitly included in the messages.
• Explicit naming: service invocations automatically generate unique names pinpointing sessions which are then managed to let participants enter/leave sessions.