Automata-Based Verification of Non-Functional Requirements in Web Service Composition

We address the problem of how to provide guarantees to a user that an automatically generated composition of independently developed web services meets the non-functional requirements (NFR). The user-specified NFR are in the form of hard constraints. We introduce an automata-based model for representing and reasoning about non-functional requirements for verifying the conformance to NFR. The approach described here enables this verification by lifting the NFR analysis from the level of individual services to the level of the search space of candidate compositions obtained from the functional requirements. The proposed approach can accommodate the different subsets of NFR for different components of a composite service. We introduce three different strategies when multiple NFRs exist and analyze their relative advantages and disadvantages under different scenarios. We present results which show that this approach to verifying the NFR can support efficient re-verification of web-service compositions whenever NFR are updated. The approach described here has been applied in service composition based on NFR in an Emergency Management System.