Exploiting hierarchical CP-nets to increase the reliability of Web services workflow

Individual Web services can be composed together to form value-added composite Web services represented as business process workflow. However, the value of such composite Web services is directly influenced by the reliability of the composite services. Composing Web services is not an easy task and is error-prone, so there is a growing interest for the verification techniques which enable designers to find and repair design errors even before actual running of the service, or allow designers to detect erroneous properties such as deadlocks or livelocks and formally verify whether the service process design does have certain desired properties (such as consistency with the conversation protocols of partner service). In this paper, we present to analyze and verify Web services composition by using some kind of colored Petri nets (CP-nets) called hierarchical CP-nets, which combine the strengths of Petri nets with the expressive power of high-level programming and have sound mathematical semantics. Services composition proposals can be transformed by transformation rules into CP-nets, which can be simulated to analyze the performance and verified to investigate behavioral properties by exploiting existing CP-nets specialized tools