In the service-oriented architecture (SOA), we distinguish three roles of service owners: service providers, service requesters, and service brokers. Each service provider publishes information to the broker about how requesters can interact with its service. Thus, the broker can assign a fitting service provider to a querying requester.

We propose the information published to the broker to be operating guidelines. Operating guidelines are essentially communication instructions for the service requester. We present an automata-theoretic approach that is centered around operating guidelines and is capable of implementing all tasks arising in the SOA.