Formal Specification of the Assurance Point Web Service Composition Model

Abstract

This paper presents a formal specification of the Assurance Point (AP) web service composition model. The AP model provides a flexible way of checking constraints and responding to execution errors in service composition. An AP is a combined logical and physical checkpoint, providing an execution milestone that stores critical data and interacts with integration rules (IRs) to alter program flow and to invoke different forms of recovery depending on the execution status. In this paper, the execution and recovery semantics of assurance points have been fully defined in the context of if-else, parallel, and loop control structures. The activities and complex control structures of the AP model have been formalized and tested in the Yet Another Workflow Language (YAWL) engine. By doing so, the correctness of the execution and recovery semantics in the AP model has been verified, demonstrating that YAWL nets of the AP model satisfy the soundness property. Different from existing web service composition models, the AP model presented by this research provides multiple levels of protection against service execution failure with a combination of forward and backward recovery techniques.