Extension of specification language for soundness and completeness of service workflow

ABSTRACT

A Service Workflow is an aggregation of distributed services to fulfill specific functionalities. With ever increasing available services, the methodologies for the selections of the services against the given requirements become main research subjects in multiple disciplines. A few of researchers have contributed to the formal specification languages and the methods for model checking; however, existing methods have the difficulties to tackle with the complexity of workflow compositions. In this paper, we propose to formalize the specification language to reduce the complexity of the workflow composition. To this end, we extend a specification language with the consideration of formal logic, so that some effective theorems can be derived for the verification of syntax, semantics, and inference rules in the workflow composition. The logic-based approach automates compliance checking effectively. The Service Workflow Specification (SWSpec) has been extended and formulated, and the soundness, completeness, and consistency of SWSpec applications have been verified; note that a logic-based SWSpec is mandatory for the development of model checking. The application of the proposed SWSpec has been demonstrated by the examples with the addressed soundness, completeness, and consistency.

KEYWORDS:

• Enterprise systems
• service workflows
• specification language
• soundness
• completeness
• service composition
• Syntax
• Semantics
• service-oriented architecture (SOA)
• first order logic (FOL)
• computational tree Logic (CTL)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.