Probabilistic Model Checking-Based Service Selection Method for Business Process Modeling

Abstract

Business process modeling is a way to the organizational change management, which provides abstract workflows to describe business logics for customer demands analysis and IT infrastructures improvement. In order to reuse business process for covering different application scopes, it requires the capacity of configuring each task of business process by selecting appropriate services from the candidate services set, and then assembling them together to properly work with each other as domain-specific software. Considering choosing an executable business process with high quality service (QoS), the service selection is regarded as the pivotal step of determining process instances since service displays probabilistic behaviors under the uncertainty of Internet making business process shown different reliability. In this paper, it proposes an approach to the service selection for business process modeling. In the first phase, the function similarity method is used to pick out services from service repository in order to build a set of candidate services, which checks the functions description to find matching services, especially service may publish one or more functions through multiple interfaces. In the second phase, the probabilistic model checking-based method is employed to the quantitative verification of process instances, which involves services composition and stochastic behaviors computing according to workflow structures. Then, corresponding algorithms are discussed for service selection purposes. Furthermore, it introduces the probabilistic model checking-based framework for prototype design and implementation. Finally, experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method comparing with traditional methods.