Detecting feature interactions in Web services with model checking techniques

As a platform-independent software system, a Web service is designed to offer interoperability among diverse and heterogeneous applications. With the introduction of service composition in the Web service creation, various message interactions among the atomic services result in a problem resembling the feature interaction problem in the telecommunication area. This article defines the problem as feature interaction in Web services and proposes a model checking-based detection method. In the method, the Web service description is translated to the Promela language — the input language of the model checker simple promela interpreter (SPIN), and the specific properties, expressed as linear temporal logic (LTL) formulas, are formulated according to our classification of feature interaction. Then, SPIN is used to check these specific properties to detect the feature interaction in Web services.