From Implicit to Explicit Transitions in Business Protocols: A Semantic-Based Transformation

Modeling Web services is a major step towards their automated analysis. One of the important parameters in this modeling, for the majority of Web services, is the time. A Web service can be presented by its behavior which can be described by a business protocol representing the possible sequences of message exchanges. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, automated analysis of timed Web services (e.g., compatibility and replaceability checking) is very difficult and in some cases it is not possible with the presence of implicit transitions (internal transitions) based on time constraints. The semantics of the implicit transitions is the source of this difficulty because most of well-known modeling tools do not express this semantics (e.g., epsilon transition on the timed automata has a different semantics). This paper presents an approach for converting any protocol containing implicit transitions to an equivalent one without implicit transitions before performing analysis. From Implicit to Explicit Transitions in Business Protocols: A Semantic-Based Transformation