Protocol-Level Service Composition Mismatches: A Petri Net Siphon Based Solution

Protocol-level mismatch is one of the most important problems in service composition. The state-of-the-art method to deal with protocol mismatch is to generate adaptors to check deadlock-freeness based on a reachability graph. When this property is violated, the generation process will repeat itself until no deadlock state is found; however, the main drawback of this method is that it does not take into account the future deadlock state and requires many interactions with a developer. In this regard, it suffers from low efficiency. In this paper, the authors model multiple web service interaction with a Petri net called Composition net (C-net). The protocol-level mismatch problem is transformed into the empty siphon problem of a C-net. The authors take future deadlock states into consideration through this model, while finding the optimal solution that involves fewest interactions with a developer. The proposed method is proved to achieve higher efficiency for resolving protocol-level mismatch issues than traditional ones.