Model-Driven Approaches to Service Composition

Abstract

Companies are now making their know-how and information available over the network using Web services. Business-to-Business collaboration through Web service interaction is now a necessary step to better satisfy user requests. The act of combining Web services to achieve a common goal - also known as Web service composition - is a complex issue that should be addressed. Many programming languages were developed to realize interaction between services, such as XLANG, WSFL, and BPEL. However, these languages are meant for the implementation and execution rather than providing a visual representation of the composition. In the past few years, the research community has been trying to tackle this issue by proposing model-driven approaches with the main objective to reduce development time. Some of these approaches are based on formal methods in order to describe, analyze, verify and validate the composition. In other words, applying these methods in design phase helps designers to show explicitly the behavior of Web services, to reason on the composition behavior and verify its properties. In this paper, the authors survey model-driven approaches for service composition. The focus is on surveying and classifying approaches that follow model-driven engineering principles for creating high-level models rather than programming concepts.