A Petri net-based model for web service composition

The Internet is going through several major changes. It has become a vehicle of Web services rather than just a repository of information. Many organizations are putting their core business competencies on the Internet as a collection of Web services. An important challenge is to integrate them to create new value-added Web services in ways that could never be foreseen forming what is known as Business-to-Business (B2B) services. Therefore, there is a need for modeling techniques and tools for reliable Web service composition. In this paper, we propose a Petri net-based algebra, used to model control flows, as a necessary constituent of reliable Web service composition process. This algebra is expressive enough to capture the semantics of complex Web service combinations.