A Petri Nets based functional validation for services composition

Abstract

The service-oriented architecture (SOA) has been quite prevailing in enterprise applications development, integration, and deployment. In SOA environment, the complex problem can be solved by combining available individual services and ordering them to best suit their problem requirements. Service composition accelerates rapid enterprise application development, service reuse, and complex service consummation. Along with its dissemination, a potential - inevitable but must-be-overcome - problem is lack of interoperability among services as well as poor integrity and quality of individual ones. There are many existing approaches to compose service composition, ranging from abstract methods to those aiming to be industry standards (e.g. BPEL, BPSS, WSFL, etc.). However, they have been biased to define the SOA technology to create service composition. Explicitly, few approaches have concerned to the service composition at design time. Consequently, there is an urgent need for a systematic approach to assure integrity and interoperability, in service composition at design time. In this paper, we utilize a functional validation to check the seamless connectivity between individual services to be composed and to represent services' interdependency (e.g., invocation precedence) in a Petri Nets with reachability analysis and each service's semantic description (e.g., functionality and role, input/output data definition, QoS metrics and values). This approach can be further used as a service composition validation methodology and an input to quality assessment, either as is or with augmentation. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.