Process Composition of Web Services with Complex Conversation Protocols: a Colored Petri Nets Based Approach

摘要

Web Services offer a new paradigm for distributed computing on the World Wide Web. Web services composition allows us to combine a number of existing Web services into a new, value-added Web service. As the complexity of the available Web services increases, many of them exhibit complex conversation protocols, requiring that the offered operations be invoked according to specific synchronization rules. This paper addresses the problems of (1) the specification of complex conversation protocols, (2) the composition of Web services incorporating partners with complex conversation protocols, and (3) verification of a Web services composition and its conformance to component services conversation protocols. We propose a Colored Petri net-based model for the specification of both the conversation protocol and the composition of Web services in order to address the above problems.