Towards formalizing web service composition in maude’s strategy language

Abstract
WS.BPEL 2.0 (Web Services Business Process Execution Language) commonly known as BPEL for short, is currently the de-facto standard language to represent the behavior of web services composition. It offers the possibility to specify the behavior of business processes in two ways: executable and abstract business processes. An abstract business process defines a business protocol that describes the ordering of messages to be sent and received to or from a web service. An executable process, which is the focus of this paper, defines the execution order of a set of activities, the partners involved in the process, the messages and the events exchanged between partners. BPEL suffers, in fact, from a lack of standard formal semantics. This weakness can lead to inconsistencies, ambiguities, and incompleteness within the developed models. We present, in this paper, a novel approach for formalizing web service composition as an executable formal specification described in the Maude language Strategy, a recent extension of Maude. The formalization process is accomplished in two steps: (1) translating the BPEL description in an extension of UML 2.0 called UML-S “UML for Services” and (2) translating the UML-S graphical description generated to Maude’s strategy language.
Description
Keywords
Web service composition, Formal semantic, Maude strategy language
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