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Conformance checking of service behavior

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Published:28 May 2008Publication History
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Abstract

A service-oriented system is composed of independent software units, namely services, that interact with one another exclusively through message exchanges. The proper functioning of such system depends on whether or not each individual service behaves as the other services expect it to behave. Since services may be developed and operated independently, it is unrealistic to assume that this is always the case. This article addresses the problem of checking and quantifying how much the actual behavior of a service, as recorded in message logs, conforms to the expected behavior as specified in a process model. We consider the case where the expected behavior is defined using the BPEL industry standard (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services). BPEL process definitions are translated into Petri nets and Petri net-based conformance checking techniques are applied to derive two complementary indicators of conformance: fitness and appropriateness. The approach has been implemented in a toolset for business process analysis and mining, namely ProM, and has been tested in an environment comprising multiple Oracle BPEL servers.

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                    cover image ACM Transactions on Internet Technology
                    ACM Transactions on Internet Technology  Volume 8, Issue 3
                    May 2008
                    127 pages
                    ISSN:1533-5399
                    EISSN:1557-6051
                    DOI:10.1145/1361186
                    Issue’s Table of Contents

                    Copyright © 2008 ACM

                    Publisher

                    Association for Computing Machinery

                    New York, NY, United States

                    Publication History

                    • Published: 28 May 2008
                    • Accepted: 1 December 2006
                    • Revised: 1 May 2006
                    • Received: 1 November 2005
                    Published in toit Volume 8, Issue 3

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