Analysis of WS-CDL Specifications Using Colored Petri Nets

Enrique Caliz

Year

2010

Season

Spring

Paper Type

Master's Thesis

College

College of Computing, Engineering & Construction

Degree Name

Master of Science in Computer and Information Sciences (MS)

Department

Computing

First Advisor

Dr. Karthikeyan Umpathy

Second Advisor

Dr. Sherif A. Elfayoumy

Third Advisor

Dr. Arturo J. Sanchez

Department Chair

Dr. Judith L. Solano

College Dean

Dr. Peter A. Braza

Abstract

Support for complex interactions among Web services is important in the context of cross-organizational business processes. Successful completion of longrunning interactions involving multi-party services requires the establishment of conversation policies to which each service must adhere. The Web Services Choreography Description Language (WS-CDL) proposes to facilitate just that by providing means to describe series of correlated message exchanges among services geared towards achieving a business goal. These specifications take the form of XML documents. The problem is, while readable, these documents do not readily allow a developer to determine whether or not the patterns of message exchanges they stipulate do indeed reflect his or her intentions. This is relevant because the specification of the order in which these message exchanges occur must be free of faults that could result in unwanted sequences of message exchanges or in a failure for desired sequences to be carried out. It would be too costly if such faults did not manifest themselves until the Web services were actually set up and engaged in message exchanges according to the specification. The contribution of the research presented in this thesis is it demonstrates Colored Petri Net (CPN) technology can be used to analyze WS-CDL specifications, searching for “red flags” that may be indicative of faults in the specification. It is expected this approach can serve as a basis for the verification of WS-CDL specifications. This thesis also presents a research prototype, written in Java that aids the creation of a CPN model for a given WS-CDL specification document.

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