An Automatic Modeling Method for Web Service Business Processes towards CPN Model Checking

Abstract

With the development of the Internet, the ever-increasing business demands have led to the emergence of web service composition technology. The Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) is a widely used web service composition standard, which reorganizes existing services to define new ones. However, the complexity and concurrency of the combined business process make it difficult to ensure its correctness, so it is particularly important to verify the business process. In this paper, we propose a method to automatically generate a Colored Petri Net (CPN) model of a BPEL process and use model checking to find errors in the process. We first preprocess the BPEL program, and then use the preprocessing information to generate different model modules according to the conversion rules, and finally form a complete CPN model according to the relationship between the processes. The automatically generated model can be opened with CPN Tools and combined with ASK-CTL for model checking. On the one hand, automated modeling can solve the shortcomings of manual modeling that are prone to errors and inefficient. On the other hand, model checking can not only find properties such as deadlocks and liveness in BPEL processes, but also detect missing input and redundant output errors in data flow. The experimental results verify the feasibility and correctness of the method.