Research And Implementation On A BPEL4WS-Based Web Service Composition Modeling Tool

Web service technology has become more and more popular. A large amount of stable and easy-to-use web services have been shared on Internet. And nowadays they are applied widely in enterprises for business. Single web service can only provide limited capabilities, but real enterprise applications are more complicated. Single service usually can't meet the requirements of enterprise applications. In order to implement complex business and make good use of shared web services, it's necessary to compose or integrate web services together. Web service composition can provide stronger capabilities, promote application development and meet the users' requirements.A lot of heterogeneous and geographically distributed enterprise applications have been encapsulated by web service technology. Nowadays, it's a mature and reasonable way to use web service composition and workflow technologies to model open, clear, automatic and loosely-coupled business processes. In order to implement web service composition effectively, more researchers are working on web service composition modeling tool.Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS) has become a web service standard maintained by OASIS. This language is used to describe the business behaviors between web services. Research on BPEL4WS-based modeling tool has attracted more researchers, because it can simplify the mapping from abstract process to executable process.Considering the diversity of web services, how to implement process design, service selection and service binding dynamically are also key points.The main contributions of this thesis are: analyze BPEL4WS deeply, design the architecture of web service composition, and make the modeling process consistent with BPEL4WS; design and implement a property-based solution for service discovery and selection in order to bind services dynamically; implement an interactive web service composition modeling tool, which supports the mapping from abstract process to executable process described by BPEL4WS.The innovations in this thesis are as follows:1. Design and implement a BPEL4WS-based interactive modeling tool for web service composition; integrate service discovery and selection into modeling procedure with UDDIe interfaces. 2. Considering the diversity of web services, design a web service propertytemplate and a property-based selection algorithm.The modeling tool implemented in the thesis has been applied in the National 863 Program undertaken by Shandong University - Manufacturing Grid Project. The tool is used for the collaboration between manufacturing enterprises. It can reorganize manufacturing web services into a job, and then the job can be submitted to Job Manager for execution. This tool is also available for other domains.Based on the above researches, the modeling tool still needs to be improved in several aspects: the conciseness of modeling, the QoS-based service selection and the support of dynamic binding during execution.