Dependency Modeling of a SOA Based System Through Colored Petri Nets

Dependency relationships play an important role in testing, maintenance and configuration management of software systems. The informal dependency representations fail to observe behavioral connections among subsystems and cause ambiguity in representing different types of dependency relationships. Therefore, dependency in a software system requires a formal and unambiguous representation so that its correct effects can be visualized. In this paper, we present a Colored Petri Net based dependency analysis of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based system that represents specification of dependency relationships and models the dependencies in a SOA based system at conceptual level. Different types of dependency relations are represented in a formal manner by using Service Algebra. A module SOA based system ‘Online Bookshop’ has been developed and used for the purpose of modeling and example demonstration. Such modeling can help in identification of inconsistency among services, and web services can be verified for safety and reliability.