On Context-Specific Substitutability of Web Services

Web service substitution refers to the problem of identifying a service that can replace another service in the context of a composition with a specified functionality. Existing solutions to this problem rely on detecting the functional and behavioral equivalence of a particular service to be replaced and candidate services that could replace it. We introduce the notion of context-specific substitutability, where context refers to the overall functionality of the composition that is required to be maintained after replacement of its constituents. Using the context information, we investigate two variants of the substitution problem, namely environment-independent and environment- dependent, where environment refers to the constituents of a composition and show how the substitutability criteria can be relaxed within this model. We provide a logical formulation of the resulting criteria based on model checking techniques as well as prove the soundness and completeness of the proposed approach.