A Petri Net-based Specification Model towards Verifiable Services Computing

The emerging paradigm of Web services opens a new way of engineering enterprise Web applications via rapidly developing and deploying Web applications, by composing independently published Web service components to conduct new business transactions. However, how to formally validate and reason about the properties of an enterprise system composed of Web service components remains a challenge. This chapter introduces an advanced topic of enterprise service computing – formal verification and validation of enterprise Web services. The authors introduce a Web Services Net (WS-Net), which is an executable architectural description language incorporating the semantics of Colored Petri Nets with the style and understandability of the Object-Oriented concept and Web services concept. As an architectural model that formalizes the architectural topology and behaviors of each Web service component as well as the entire system, WS-Net facilitates the simulation, verification, and automated composition of Web services.