Service matchmaking revisited: An approach based on model checking

The aim of service discovery is to find services that satisfy user requests in a precise and effective manner. An important aspect of service discovery is service matchmaking, which constitutes the mechanism to map appropriate services to requests. Current service matchmaking approaches mostly use the knowledge about the interface descriptions of services. However, these approaches suffer from lack of precision since they do not consider the internal processes of services.This paper proposes a novel service matchmaking approach that uses the internal process models of services as primary source of knowledge. To reason about the internal process models and to identify matching services to requests, we use model checking as a reasoning mechanism. In order to facilitate partial matches, we use ontologies and relaxation techniques to generate alternative requests. Hence, even when a request cannot be satisfied by a service, our approach can identify which similar requests are satisfied by the service. This important information can enable better service selection for the service consumers. We also provide a guideline to illustrate how our proposed matchmaking approach can be realized using recent technologies from Web services and formal verification domains in a real world setting.