Behavior Of Software And Services To Achieve Consistency Analysis And Prototype Systems

With the development of services computing and cloud computing, software-as-a-service has become the mainstream application style under open environments. A large number of new services appear increasingly. On the one hand, it provides a convenience for the usage of service composition technology to develop value-added services and agile applications. On the other hand, it also brings challenges on how to effectively search the required services or similar ones. Expanding enterprise business processes make the behavior of corresponding services increasingly-complex. Based on the keywords of service interfaces cannot guarantee to find the qualified services. Hence, we need to search the appropriate services or similar ones from the perspective of the behavioral consistency.Most existing methods analyze and measure the consistency focusing only on the control-flow aspect. For example, some methods use the notion of trace equivalence and bi-simulation in the liner time branch spectrum to define the behavioral consistency between services. Most of them can only get a "true" or "false" result so that they fail to distinguish the serious inconsistencies and subtle inconsistencies. Although a few of them can obtain a quantitative result, they focus only on the control flow and cannot distinguish the differences of data-flow. To address these problems, this paper considers both the control-flow and data-flow information of services and presents a consistency measurement based on the activity constraints (partial order, mutual exclusion and independence). This approach could not only support a quantitative result (between0and1.0), but also return the inconsistent information back to the users. In this paper, the experiments utilize the real data set of WS-BPEL processes which evaluates the effectiveness and reasonability of our approach. The major contribution of this work is as follows:1. In the service implementation level, we take the industry standard WS-BPEL processes as examples to analyze the behavioral consistency between different service implementations. We utilize the program dependence graph to describe the activity constraints in a WS-BPEL process. Then, with the notions of process alignment and consistent activity constraints, we present an approach for measuring and analyzing behavioral consistency of services based on the activity constraints.2. Between the service implementation and its abstract process model, we take the WS-BPEL and Petri nets as examples to analyze the behavioral consistency between the executable and conceptual business processes. We leverage the program dependence graph and behavioral profiles to be the behavioral abstract of the WS-BPEL processes and abstract process models, respectively. This way, the consistency problem between the service implementation and its abstract process model is transformed to the consistency problem between their activity constraints.3. In order to evaluate the feasibility of the proposed approach, this paper designed and implemented the prototype system COCO. In addition, we show the applicability of our approach by two application scenarios:the evaluation of process mining techniques and behavior-based service searching.