Towards workflow simulation in service-oriented architecture: an event-based approach

The emergence of service-oriented architecture (SOA) has brought about a loosely coupled computing environment that enables flexible integration and reuse of heterogeneous systems. On building a SOA for application systems, more and more research has been focused on service composition, in which workflow and simulation techniques have shown great potential. Simulation of services’ interaction is important since the services ecosystem is dynamic and in continuous evolution. However, there is a lack in the research of services’ simulation, especially models, methods and systems to support the simulation of interaction behavior of composite services. In this paper, an enhanced workflow simulation method with the support of interactive events mechanism is proposed to fulfill this requirement. At build time, we introduce an event sub-model in the workflow meta-model, and our simulation engine supports the event-based interaction pattern at run time. With an example simulated in the prototype system developed according to our method, the advantages of our method in model verification and QoS evaluation for service compositions are also highlighted. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.