A Case Study in Defining Colored Petri Nets Based Model Driven Development of Enterprise Service Oriented Architectures

Many businesses as well as government enterprises are moving towards service oriented architectures for their operation. The level of complexity, interaction and interdependence among various components make it difficult to design, develop, and analyze such systems as a whole. In particular it is difficult to foretell the effect of proposed changes and to evaluate alternative architectures. Adoption of a model-driven approach, coupled with sound verification and validation (V and V) techniques can provide a key solution for making qualitative and quantitative predictions about the possible system behaviors. This paper details a case study in verification and validation of a service oriented architecture called MCSOA (multi channel service oriented architecture). It is part of a larger exercise to integrate a model-driven approach into MCSOA software development for the US Department of Defense. We show how support for hierarchical and abstraction features, concurrency, and both synchronous and asynchronous communications in colored Petri nets (CPNs) enable modeling real-world SOA implementations to perform V and V and quality assurance required for DoD deployments.