Usability analysis of Web Service behavior based on interface automata

In the Web Service world, it is an important technique that taking the usable behaviors in the existed web services provides some value-added functions by the service composition. Therefore, the usability analysis of web service behaviors is a significant problem to be solved. Based on our early study about behavior derivation for software components by interface automata (IA), a method is given for checking whether there are usable behaviors in a web service or not according to a user's requirement. A behavior is usable if it can be preserved in a composite web service under some constraints, otherwise it is unusable. Web services are described by BPEL4WS and the user's requirements are specified by MSCs. The key step in our proposal is to build an IA model for the web service behaviors. Thus, we give the transformation rules from BPEL4WS to IA. By using the algorithm of constructing an environment for an IA which had been given in our early works, the usability of a web service behaviors is checked. A case study from real application is used to validate our proposal.