A Survey on Formal Methods for Web Service Composition

TL;DR

This survey reviews formal methods applied to Web Service Composition, analyzing existing approaches, proposing a reference model, and discussing future trends to improve cross-organizational business process integration.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive reference model for Web Service Composition and analyzes the state-of-the-art formal methods and their formalization issues.

Findings

Established the RM-WSComposition reference model.

Identified key formalization issues in Web Service Composition.

Discussed future trends in formal methods for Web Service Composition.

Abstract

Web Service Composition creates new composite Web Services from existing Web Services which embodies the added values of Web Service technology and is a key technology to solve cross-organizational business process integrations. We do a survey on formal methods for Web Service Composition in the following way. Through analyses of Web Service Composition, we establish a reference model called RM-WSComposition to capture elements of Web Service Composition. Based on the RM-WSComposition, issues on formalization for Web Service Composition are pointed out and state-of-the-art on formal methods for Web Service Composition is introduced. Finally, we point out the trends on this topic. For convenience, we use an example called BuyingBooks to illustrate the concepts and mechanisms in Web Service Composition.