A Petri Net Approach to Analysis and Composition of Web Services

Business process execution language for Web services (BPEL) is becoming the industrial standard for modeling Web-service-based business processes. Behavioral compatibility for Web service composition is one of the most important topics. The commonly used reachability exploration method focuses on verifying deadlock freeness. When this property is violated, the states and traces in the reachability graph only give clues to redesign the composition. The redesign must then repeat itself until no deadlock is found. In this paper, multiple Web service interaction is modeled with a Petri net called composition net (C-net for short). The problem of behavioral compatibility among Web services is hence transformed into the deadlock structure problem of a C-net. If services are incompatible, a policy based on appending additional information channels is proposed. It is proved that the policy can offer a good solution that can be mapped back into the BPEL models automatically.