Indexing Business Processes based on Annotated Finite State Automata

Abstract

The existing service discovery infrastructure with UDDI as the de facto standard, is limited in that it does not support more complex searching based on matching business processes. Two business processes match if they agree on their simple services, their processing order as well as any mandatory or optional requirements for the service. This matching semantics can be formalized by modelling business processes as annotated finite state automata (aFSAs) and deciding emptiness of the intersection aFSA. Computing the intersection of aFSAs and deciding emptiness are computationally expensive, being more than quadratic on the number of states and transitions, thus does not scale for large service repositories. This paper presents an approach for indexing and matching business processes modeled as aFSAs, for the purpose of service discovery. Evaluation of this approach shows a performance gain of several orders of magnitude over sequential matching and a linear complexity with regard to the data set size.

Behavioral matchmaking for service retrieval: Application to conversation protocols

“…To summarize, the need to take into account the service behavior in the retrieval process was underlined by several authors and some recent proposals exist [18,19]. The few approaches that exist give a negative answer to the user if a model satisfying exactly his requirements does not exist in the registries, even if a model that requires a small modification exists.…”

“…Computing the intersection is computationally expensive, and thus does not scale for large service repositories. To solve this problem, the authors of [18] present an indexing approach for querying cyclic business processes using traditional database systems. The choice of finite state automata as a modelling formalism limits the expressiveness of the models, for instance representing parallel execution capabilities can lead to very large models.…”

The generic model query language GMQL – Conceptual specification, implementation, and runtime evaluation

“…Such an analysis has to include runtime measurements in units of time in order to be comparable to the data presented in the paper at hand. In some articles, the performance of the given query language was ascertained as a percentage increase in comparison to some older version of that language (e.g., [53]). We do not consider such analyses, because there is no direct way of comparing corresponding runtime measurements.…”

Capability description and discovery of Internetware entity

“…It is more expressive than service interface-based description. Various behavioral models including extended finite-state automata, process algebraic notations, graph formalism and logic formalisms have been studied [29][30][31][32][33][34][35]. Web services are developed by different teams, and are described in different conceptual frameworks without prior agreement.…”