An approach to the formal description of service contracts is presented in
terms of automata. We focus on the basic property of guaranteeing that in the
multi-party composition of principals each of them gets his requests satisfied,
so that the overall composition reaches its goal. Depending on whether requests
are satisfied synchronously or asynchronously, we construct an orchestrator
that at static time either yields composed services enjoying the required
properties or detects the principals responsible for possible violations. To do
that in the asynchronous case we resort to Linear Programming techniques. We
also relate our automata with two logically based methods for specifying
contracts
