Towards formal checking of Web services substitutability

Web services are considered as one of the emerging technologies in the development, deployment and integration of Internet applications, and this, thanks to their features of universal interoperability and their ability to be reused and composed with other web services. Their substitution is one of the most challenging topics in service computing area. In this paper, we investigate a context-independent substitutability of Web services. We use Open Colored Petri Nets (OCNets) as a formal modeling framework of web services and we propose an approach for verifying the substitutability which proceeds in two steps. First, we compare the structures of OCNets' interfaces while deducting the type of the relation between them. After that, we generate the services automata of the OCNets, and we compare their behaviors by using the algorithm WS Behavioral Substitutability Checking.