Extracting Behavioral Models from WS-BPEL Processes for Service Discovery

As service behavior plays a key role in service interaction, behavior-based service discovery has been increasingly recognized as a critical activity for service-based systems. However, little attention has been paid to the retrieval of behavioral models, which is critical for behavior-based discovery. This paper proposes an approach for extracting service behavioral models from WS-BPEL, which has been emerging as the prominent language for service orchestration. Our approach identifies all participants involved in a WS-BPEL process and abstracts the interaction of the process with its participants through behavioral models. Furthermore, we distinguish three types of ordering constraints between activities in behavioral models. Based on this, we present a mechanism to automatically adapt WS-BPEL processes to find and use other similar services when no service satisfies exactly the specified requirements. We have implemented a prototype to demonstrate and evaluate our approach.