Data-Driven Service Composition in Enterprise SOA Solutions: A Petri Net Approach

Under Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), service composition is used to integrate service components together to meet new business needs. In this paper, we propose a novel data-driven method to provide service composition guidance to implement given requirements. Based on the relations between business domain data and service domain data, we generate additional data mediations according to three composition rules. With these data relations and composition rules, we propose a Petri-net based approach to the composition of services. In our approach, all the in/output messages of the service operations are modeled as colored places, and service operations themselves are modeled as transitions with input/output places. We first generate a Service Net (SN) that contains all operations in a given service portfolio, and then use Petri-net decomposition techniques to derive a subnet of SN, and this subnet meets the need of the business requirement. Our work can be seen as an effort to bridge the gap between business and service domains. Note to Practitioners-Web services composition is an emerging area for business process automation. This work presents a novel framework to compose web services from the perspective of data. It is based on colored Petri nets and a newly proposed concept called Service Net. The proposed method represents both data relations and service composition rules with colored Petri nets. If a business requirement is given with input/output data, we convert the Service Net into a reduced one, and decompose it into subnets that can be candidate composition solutions. A real-life case is used to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed concepts and method. Our method can be readily used in industrial web service composition for business automation.