Issues about the Adoption of Formal Methods for Dependable Composition of Web Services
This work addresses the problem of ensuring reliable service composition in B2B applications for developers and researchers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing formal methods without introducing a new paradigm.
The paper investigates the adoption of formal methods for dependable composition of Web Services, analyzing foundational, verification, and extension issues, and proposes tentative answers based on a composition calculus to stimulate discussion.
Web Services provide interoperable mechanisms for describing, locating and invoking services over the Internet; composition further enables to build complex services out of simpler ones for complex B2B applications. While current studies on these topics are mostly focused - from the technical viewpoint - on standards and protocols, this paper investigates the adoption of formal methods, especially for composition. We logically classify and analyze three different (but interconnected) kinds of important issues towards this goal, namely foundations, verification and extensions. The aim of this work is to individuate the proper questions on the adoption of formal methods for dependable composition of Web Services, not necessarily to find the optimal answers. Nevertheless, we still try to propose some tentative answers based on our proposal for a composition calculus, which we hope can animate a proper discussion.