Web Service Composition and Analysis: A Petri-net Based Approach

Discovering and assembling individual Web services into more complex yet new and more useful Web processes is an important challenge. In this paper, we propose a Petri net-based algebra to capture the semantics of complex Web service combinations. Based on atomic Web services, a Petri net is created to represent all possible combinations of atomic operations and specify the desired goal as a state of this Petri net. With the standard Petri net techniques, we are able to analyze the essential properties such as usability and satisfiability of a Web service.