Verification of Web Service Compositions: An Operationalization of Correctness and a Requirements Framework for Service-oriented Modeling Techniques

Web service compositions (WS compositions) coordinate Web services of different enterprises. They are expected to constitute the foundation of service-oriented architectures, to improve business processes as well as to foster intraand inter-organizational integration. Especially in inter-organizational contexts, quality of service referring to non-functional requirements and conformance to functional requirements are becoming vital properties. With WS compositions being asynchronous and distributed systems, the latter – which is also called correctness – can be shown best by verification. This paper examines how correctness has to be operationalized for WS compositions. It also examines how service-oriented modeling techniques should be shaped so that correctness can be shown by verification while WS compositions can be modeled intuitively. Correctness is analyzed from a system-theoretic viewpoint. Moreover, a requirements framework for formal foundations and modeling support is proposed. In order to show the framework’s principle applicability, one example approach is analyzed with respect to the corresponding requirements.