Advanced Workflow Patterns

Towards an approach of formal verification of mediation protocol based on web services of MDE type

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to formally verify the composition of web services to reduce inconsistencies in software architectures.

Design/methodology/approach

In order to check the web services composition, the authors use a model‐driven engineering (MDE)‐based approach and to achieve the formalization of web service composition in ACME and check the consistency of this composition, the authors introduce the pattern mediation to formalize web services composition with the ADL ACME, using the concept of architectural style of ACME. Subsequently, a scenario shows how this style can be used in ACMEStudio to detect inconsistencies. The example shows a web travel organization application.

Findings

The authors ensure reliability defined through non‐functional properties. To do so, use ACME was used to check assembling consistency of web service composition. In a second part, a SWC2ACME tool was designed and implemented to check if the web services meta‐model conforms to ACME model.

Originality/value

The paper describes a framework which has proven to be useful to ensure a safe design and execution of software architectures, specifically web services composition.

Semantic Annotation of Process Models for Facilitating Process Knowledge Management

Enterprise/business process models that represent knowledge of business processes are generally designed for particular applications in a range of different enterprises. It is a considerable challenge to manage the knowledge of processes that are distributed throughout many different information systems, due to the heterogeneity of the process models used. In this paper, the authors present a framework for semantic annotation that tackles the problem of the heterogeneity of distributed process models to facilitate management of process knowledge. The feasibility of the approach is demonstrated by means of exemplar studies, and a comprehensive empirical evaluation is used to validate the authors’ approach.