Web Service Composition Based on XML Nets

Service Science, Management and Engineering (SSME) is a growing interdisciplinary research area for studying, designing, implementing and improving service systems. As one of the instantiations of service systems, Web services (WSs) offer a new paradigm for distributed computing and system collaboration. Recently, Web service composition (WSC) has increasingly gained attention from SSME community since it aims to provide value-added WSs by combing existing WSs. In this paper we firstly survey WCS methods, among which Petri net-based methods are listed. As a variant of high-level Petri nets, XML nets have formal semantics, graphical nature, and the strength in ex-changing XML-based structured data. They are very suitable for WSC because messages can be modeled and manipulated as place tokens for message passing, and the labels in arcs can be used to model constraints for WS discovery and selection. Using XML nets for WSC can thus improve WSC models and increase their dynamics.