A Comparative Study of Formal Approaches for Web Service Oriented Architecture

Abstract

The security in web service oriented architecture (WSOA) development has become a critical need and goal. WSOA as service-oriented architecture (SOA) designs the software as services and uses the services as platforms. Web services orchestration describes how web services can interact with each other from an operational perspective. Many languages allow expression of executable processes to implementing web services orchestration. These languages are used to describe how the interactions between multiple services are coordinated to achieve a goal. However, the operational semantics of each of the structures of these languages is not formally defined and they have limitations regarding the reasoning and the verification of the web services compositions. Several studies and approaches have been proposed in this context, are devoted to the formalization of web services orchestrations and allow some verification of their behavior; these approaches are partial solutions to the problem of development of the safe composition. We explore the advantages and limitations of more than fourteen approaches and research work. We propose a model for comparison between works, studies, and approaches in this field. The proposed model adopts the concepts of the formalization and the automation of development processes.