Verifying transactional requirements of web service compositions using temporal logic templates

Abstract

Ensuring reliability in Web service compositions is of crucial interest as services are composed and executed in long-running, distributed mediums that cannot guarantee reliable communications. Towards this, transactional behavior has been proposed to handle and undo the effects of faults of individual components. Despite significant research interest, challenges remain in providing an easy-to-use, formal approach to verify transactional behavior of Web service compositions before costly development. In this paper, we propose the use of temporal logic templates to specify component-level and composition-level transactional requirements over a Web service composition. These templates are specified using a simple format, configured according to scope and cardinality, and automatically translated into temporal logic. To verify design conformance to a set of implemented templates, we employ model checking. We propose an algorithm to address state space explosion by reducing the models into semantically equivalent Kripke structures. Our approach facilitates the implementation of expressive transactional behavior onto existing complex services, as demonstrated in our experimental study.