A Petri net approach for the design and analysis of Web Services Choreographies

A Web Service is a self-describing, self-contained modular application that can be published, located, and invoked over a network, e.g. the Internet. Web Services composition provides a way to obtain value-added services by combining several Web Services. The composition of Web Services is, therefore, suitable to support enterprise application integration. WS-CDL (Web Services Choreography Description Language) is a W3C candidate recommendation for the description of peer-to-peer collaborations for the participants in a Web Services composition. In this paper we focus our attention on the development of a methodology for the design and validation of composite Web Services using WS-CDL as the language for describing Web Services interactions and Petri nets as a formalism that allows us to simulate and validate the described systems. We specifically intend, then, to capture timed and prioritized collaborations in composite Web Services, so the model of Petri nets that we use is a prioritized version of Time Petri nets.