A Formal Engineering Framework for Service-Based Software Modeling

Service-based software modeling is considered as an effective technique for developing high-quality service-based systems. One major challenge of this approach is how to effectively utilize existing software services in the process of system modeling to ensure the reliability of the system while reducing the development cost and effort. In this paper, we propose a novel formal engineering framework by integrating an evolutionary service selection approach into a formal engineering method to tackle this problem. In the framework, initial requirements are gradually transformed into a formal design specification through three steps during which existing services are discovered, filtered, selected, and employed. Candidate services are discovered through a keyword-based searching. A static behavior analysis technique is then used to filter the candidate services and a specification-based testing method is adopted to rigorously select the candidate services. The selected services are finally incorporated into the formal design model of the system. We present an empirical case study that was conducted for evaluating the usability of our framework by applying it to develop a travel agency system. The result of the study demonstrates several advantages of the framework over existing approaches but meanwhile also shows some limitation in practice.