Data-Driven Service Composition in Enterprise SOA Solutions: A Petri Net Approach

TLDR

Service composition in SOA integrates service components to fulfill new business needs. The paper proposes a data‑driven, Petri‑net based method to guide service composition and bridge business and service domains. The approach models service operations as colored Petri‑net transitions, generates a Service Net from all portfolio operations, and decomposes it using Petri‑net techniques to produce a requirement‑satisfying subnet guided by data relations and composition rules.

Abstract

Under Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), service composition is used to integrate service components together to meet new business needs. In this paper, we propose a novel data-driven method to provide service composition guidance to implement given requirements. Based on the relations between business domain data and service domain data, we generate additional data mediations according to three composition rules. With these data relations and composition rules, we propose a Petri-net based approach to the composition of services. In our approach, all the in/output messages of the service operations are modeled as colored places, and service operations themselves are modeled as transitions with input/output places. We first generate a Service Net (SN) that contains all operations in a given service portfolio, and then use Petri-net decomposition techniques to derive a subnet of SN, and this subnet meets the need of the business requirement. Our work can be seen as an effort to bridge the gap between business and service domains.