Reliable Web Services Research Articles

Architectural reliability analysis of framework-intensive applications: A web service case study

A novel methodology for modeling the reliability and performance of web services (WSs) is presented. To present the methodology, an experimental environment is developed in house, where WSs are treated as atomic entities but the underlying middleware is partitioned into layers. WSs are deployed in JBoss AS. Web service requests are generated to a remote middleware on which JBoss runs, and important performance parameters under various configurations are collected. In addition, a modularized simulation model in Petri net is developed from the architecture of the middleware and run-time behavior of the WSs. The results show that (1) the simulation model provides for measuring the performance and reliability of WSs under different loads and conditions that may be of great interest to WS designers and the professionals involved; (2) configuration parameters have substantial impact on the overall performance; (3) the simulation model provides a basis for aggregating the modules (layers), nullifying modules, or to include additional aspects of the WS architecture; and (4) the model is beneficial to predict the performance of WSs for those cases that are difficult to replicate in a field study.

Deriving reliable compositions using cancelable web services

Reliability is one of the main challenges while composing web services. Due to the inherent heterogeneity of web services, it is important to predict the behaviour of the overall composite service. Existing works that deal with reliable web service composition consider only three basic transactional properties such as pivot, retriable, and compensatable. When a service fails, its results can be ignored if it is pivot; it can be retried until it succeeds if it is retriable; or the previously completed services must be rolled back if they are compensatable, in order to achieve reliable execution. In general, business applications involve long running services. Service execution must be interrupted to adapt to dynamically changing user preferences since execution of the service to completion with the older requirements is no longer meaningful. Hence, service composition requires additional transactional support beyond the three transactional properties. To address this need, we introduce cancelable services and investigate the transactional properties of composite services that involve cancelable component services. The valid compositions, which result in a reliable execution are identified and formally verified.

Formal method-based behaviour for semantic web services discovery

The effectiveness and reliability of IS-based web services becomes a critical factor in business success. Known classical problems in the field of web services are imposed implicitly in the design and implementation of such systems, namely: description process of web service, publication process, discovery process, composition process, selection process, substitution, and adaptation process. The approach proposed in this paper allows the realisation of discovery and adaptation tasks based on the behavioural aspect of semantic web services. In this paper, we propose a new behaviour model for semantic web services using automata. The formal model used to specify the process of semantic web services is typed interface and weighted automaton (TIWA) with an operational semantics associated with different action necessary in the implementation of all the algorithms proposed in this paper.

Research on Adaptation of Service-based Business Processes

This paper proposes an adaptation mechanism based on adaptation planning graph for service-based business processes. First, a three-layer representation model of service-based business process is introduced. Second, control-flow patterns of tasks, goal, logic model of service-based business process and adaptation planning graph are introduced to enforce reliability of composite web services at run-time. Finally, a simulation example of adaptation in service-based business processes is given. Simulations prove that this approach can efficiently guarantee the reliability of composite services at run-time. DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.11591/telkomnika.v12i1.4148

Toward a Better Interoperability of Enterprise Information Systems: A CPNs and Timed CPNs -based Web Service Interoperability Verification in a Choreography

Abstract Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) claim to facilitate the construction of flexible and loosely coupled business applications. Therefore it is seen as an enabling factor for the interoperability of Enterprise Information Systems (EIS). Web services are currently the most promised concretization of SOA. This concept is currently carried further to address the composition of individual services through orchestration and choreography in order to automate a business process allowing enterprises to develop value added products. Web service choreographies are more collaborative in nature and permit direct interactions between Web services. In order to have a better interoperability of EIS, a good behavior and an efficiency of Web service choreography is necessary. This paper addresses the raised issues by providing a process of Web service choreography. The originality of this process is the formal verification of the service interoperability basing on formal methods and tools, especially Colored Petri Nets (CPNs) and Timed CPNs formal specification languages, and model checking and simulation techniques. This formal verification is done at design time, which is an important step towards reliable Web service choreography, since problems could be detected early in the development cycle before even starting the implementation. It aims to prove that Web service choreography is correct in terms on message ordering constraints and efficient in terms of time constraints. This originality reflects the reality of enterprises interoperability that depends not only on qualitative constraints (message ordering) but also on quantitative ones such as time. The effectiveness of work has been validated using the recent version of CPN Tools.

Optimized Reliable Mechanism for Improving Web Service Using WDDX and XML

Web service is reliable mechanisms for ensuring interoperabilitybetween one or more systemfor reliable data transaction. The transaction in web servicesdone using interfaceand such interface accomplished using Web service description language (WSDL). Interactions between one or more system in web services were done using the XML services. In this paper we have proposed Web service architecture to improve its efficiency with consistent interaction between systems using WDDX concept. WDDX does reliable web services using XML script for identifying system response for data transaction. We demonstrated our work with 100 system nodes subscribed to our own deployable web server using our proposed architecture with consecutive updates by both the systems to ensure high standards of data reliability. We have also measured the reliable data standards with error notification for identifying system behavior using parallel updates between sender and receiver systems as reliability measures. Our belief is that such an approach will provide efficient data transaction.

Personalized Reliability Prediction of Web Services

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a business-centric IT architectural approach for building distributed systems. Reliability of service-oriented systems heavily depends on the remote Web services as well as the unpredictable Internet connections. Designing efficient and effective reliability prediction approaches of Web services has become an important research issue. In this article, we propose two personalized reliability prediction approaches of Web services, that is, neighborhood-based approach and model-based approach. The neighborhood-based approach employs past failure data of similar neighbors (either service users or Web services) to predict the Web service reliability. On the other hand, the model-based approach fits a factor model based on the available Web service failure data and use this factor model to make further reliability prediction. Extensive experiments are conducted with our real-world Web service datasets, which include about 23 millions invocation results on more than 3,000 real-world Web services. The experimental results show that our proposed reliability prediction approaches obtain better reliability prediction accuracy than other competing approaches.

Predictive Web Service Monitoring using Probabilistic Model Checking

Web service is vulnerable to stochastic failures due to the changeful Internet environment, which will seriously impact the reliability of business-critical applications. Web service must adapt to these changes. This paper studies the monitoring issue of Web service and proposes a predictive service monitoring approach to support service-oriented software dynamic evolutions. It aims to ensure that Web service is high-quality at runtime. Considering functional and non-functional requirements, we employ probabilistic model checking technique to quantitatively verify the interactive behaviour of Web service. However, limited by time and memory, frequently performing probabilistic model checking is not a high-efficiency solution to monitor Web service. Thus, forecasting the reliability becomes an important way to enhance the performance of Web service monitoring, by which we can put forward dynamic reconfigurations before the exception occurs. For this purpose, according to the historical probability values of Web service reliability recorded in monitoring phase, we adopt the mathematical statistics, unary linear regression analysis method, to predict the probability value of reliability based on invocation duration time. Finally, a case study is discussed and experiment results demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of our approach.

QoS-driven optimisation of composite web services: an approach based on GRASP and analytical models

Development of applications based on the composition of web services is growing for a large range of domains. Due to the concurrency and synchronisation characteristics of some applications, analytical modelling is helpful for planning and predicting the quality-of-service (QoS) measures of the composite services. This study proposes an optimisation method adapted from the greedy randomised adaptive search procedure (GRASP) and integrated with analytical model solving to find service providers, which will leverage the performance and reliability of a composite web service. The proposed approach finds solutions close to the best-known configurations and is computationally efficient, enabling the fast discovery of a high-quality assignment of providers even for large scenarios with thousands of possible combinations.

Reliable Execution Based on CPN and Skyline Optimization for Web Service Composition

With development of SOA, the complex problem can be solved by combining available individual services and ordering them to best suit user's requirements. Web services composition is widely used in business environment. With the features of inherent autonomy and heterogeneity for component web services, it is difficult to predict the behavior of the overall composite service. Therefore, transactional properties and nonfunctional quality of service (QoS) properties are crucial for selecting the web services to take part in the composition. Transactional properties ensure reliability of composite Web service, and QoS properties can identify the best candidate web services from a set of functionally equivalent services. In this paper we define a Colored Petri Net (CPN) model which involves transactional properties of web services in the composition process. To ensure reliable and correct execution, unfolding processes of the CPN are followed. The execution of transactional composition Web service (TCWS) is formalized by CPN properties. To identify the best services of QoS properties from candidate service sets formed in the TCSW-CPN, we use skyline computation to retrieve dominant Web service. It can overcome that the reduction of individual scores to an overall similarity leads to significant information loss. We evaluate our approach experimentally using both real and synthetically generated datasets.

A prototype for web services reliability prediction

In this paper, we introduce a new prototype for web services reliability prediction based on a fuzzy belief Petri network FBPN. Since software reliability becomes a high interest research field and the growth of web services in the last years shows an exponential rate, the need of models for web services reliability prediction increased. We also make a review of similar Petri and fuzzy models to show how this idea came to life.

Reliable Web service selection in choreographed environments

Previous research into Web service selection mainly uses an orchestration model, in which a single entity is responsible for the selection and invocation of various Web services. However in many application scenarios, each Web service independently performs a selection, even though achieving the business's goals demands collective, pairwise interactions across the total set of Web services. This study instead considers the Web service selection problem in a choreographed environment, in which each Web service maintains its confidentiality about its collaborators and exchanges only limited amounts of information with its partners. The goal is to maximize the likelihood of completing the entire choreography in a failure-prone environment. Several experiments show that the proposed method performs similarly to a centralized method and better than three distributed Web service selection methods that involve various degrees of information about other services.

Exception Handling in Service-Based Business Processes by Applying Adaptation Planning Graph

This paper proposes an exception handling mechanism based on Adaptation Planning Graph for service-based business processes. A three-layer representation model of service-based business process is introduced firstly. And then, Logic Model of Service-based Business Process and Adaptation Planning Graph are introduced to enforce reliability of composite Web Services at run-time. Simulations prove that this approach can efficiently guarantee the reliability of composite services at run-time.

The BioVel Project: Robust phylogenetic workflows running on the GRID

The BioVel Project: Robust phylogenetic workflows running on the GRID

Dominance-Based Service Selection Scheme with Concurrent Requests

In dynamic Web service environments, the performance of the Internet is unpredictable; the reliability and effectiveness of remote Web services are also unclear. Therefore, it can hardly be guaranteed that the quality of Web service (QoWS) attributes of Web services do not fluctuate with the dynamic Web service environments. When a composite service is planned in the context of dynamic service environments, there is another aspect which has not been taken into account by existing works, namely, concurrency - the fact that multiple requests to a composite service may arrive at the same time. Considering the dynamics of Web service environments and concurrency of requests, we propose in this paper a service selection scheme which adopts top-k dominating queries to generate a composition solution rather than only select the best composition solution for a given request. The experimental results have investigated the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach and shown that it outperforms baseline and traditional methods for service selection.

Composite web QoS with workflow conditional pathways using bounded sets

In our previous work (Dillon and Mansour 2009), a stochastic reliability model of atomic web services was proposed. Using the well-known classic two-state bounded set technique, we developed a service-oriented model that dynamically calculates the reliability of composite web services with rollback recovery (Mansour and Dillon in IEEE Trans Serv Comput 4(4), 2011). In order to improve the Quality of Service, fault tolerance techniques have been introduced using recovery block adaptation. Our workflow was based on series-parallel structures that constitute parts of existing structures. It is worth mentioning that major service-oriented systems contain larger and more complex structures than the simple series and parallel ones. This is a limitation in our previous approach. In order to consider more realistic service-oriented systems, other main structures, such as AND, XOR and Loop, should be included into our model. In this article, our previous structures are generalized to include AND, XOR and Loops. In addition to generalized structures, we extended the existing two-state bounded set technique to include three-state systems. This extension was especially motivated by XOR-based structures. A comparative study between bounded set techniques and a new stochastic model is also presented. Our simulation results accurately reflect the performance of the new proposed model and confirm our theoretical studies. Furthermore, Monte Carlos simulations were performed and the results obtained clearly validate our stochastic model.

Genetic Approach for Service Selection problem in Composite Web Service

of business application in a more flexible and interoperable manner for enterprise collaboration. Satisfying the needs of service consumer and to become accustomed to changing needs, service composition is performed to compose the various capabilities of available services. With the proliferation of services presenting similar functionalities around the web, the task of service selection for service composition is intricate. It is vital to provide systematic methodology for selecting required web services according to their non-functional characteristics or quality of service (QoS). Various heuristic and meta-heuristic algorithms are evolving to solve the QoS based service selection problem. One of the meta-heuristic algorithms is genetic algorithm. In this paper, the genetic algorithm is developed to maximize the non-functional Characteristic called the reliability of the composite web service and the performance of the developed algorithm is calculated.

A Survey of Patterns for Web Services Security and Reliability Standards

An important aspect for the acceptance of Service-Oriented Architectures is having convenient ways to help designers build secure applications. Numerous standards define ways to apply security in web services. However, these standards are rather complex and sometimes overlap, which makes them hard to use and may produce inconsistencies. Representing them as patterns makes them easier to understand, to compare to other patterns, to discover inconsistencies, and to use them to build secure web services applications. Security patterns abstract the key aspects of a security mechanism and can thus be applied by non-experts. We survey here our work on security patterns for web services and their standards and we put them in perspective with respect to each other and to more fundamental patterns. We also consider other patterns for web services security. All the patterns described here have been previously published, we only show here one of them in detail as an illustration of our style for writing patterns. Our main purpose here is to enumerate them, show their use, and show how they relate to each other.

A Web Services Composition Design framework based on Agent Organization

Abstract Computing environments are becoming more open, distributed and pervasive. The web services compositions build for these dynamic environments will need to become more adaptable and adaptive to unexpected event. This paper defines a way for web services composition which based on agent organization. The functions of three layers, classification of agent, and agent model and agents design in this framework are introduced in details. It realizes a reliable and flexible web services composition using this framework.

Finite State Machine Based Evaluation Model for Web Service Reliability Analysis

Today’s world economy demands that both market access and customer service be available anytime and anywhere. The Web is the only way to supply global economic needs and, due to expand the development of comprehensive web service, it does so relatively inexpensively. The ability of web service is to provide a relatively inexpensive way to deploy customer services. As days goes on the business logic of a system emerges out at a great extent where it has to react to several different competitors under different situations. Through means of a business logic system we can able to achieve faster communication of information, rampant change and increasing business complexity. As competitors gets increased, so it causes the business parties to improve by promoting the business process management to the standard level by incorporating the higher-end technology solution such as service oriented business communication and business rule management automation. Now-a-days they are very much considering about the changes to be done at shorter time since the reaction time needs are decreasing every moment. Business Logic Evaluation Model (BLEM) are the proposed solution targeting business logic automation and facilitating business experts to write sophisticated business rules and complex calculations without costly custom programming. BLEM is powerful enough to handle service manageability issues by analyzing and evaluating the computability and traceability and other criteria of modified business logic at run time. The web service and QOS grows expensively based on the reliability of the service. Hence the service provider of today things that reliability is the major factor and any problem in the reliability of the service should overcome then and there in order to achieve the expected level of reliability. In our paper we propose business logic evaluation model for web service reliability analysis using Finite State Machine (FSM) where FSM will be extended to analyze the reliability of composed set of service i.e., services under composition, by analyzing reliability of each participating service of composition with its functional work flow process. FSM is exploited to measure the quality parameters. If any change occurs in the business logic the FSM will automatically measure the reliability.