Reduction Rules for Interaction Graphs

Abstract

The internet today has grown to be more than just being a basis for exchanging information. It steadily becomes a platform for processing business processes. Many companies distribute their service with the help of web services or integrate other web services into their own workflow. However, before a web service gets published it should be examined well. We will introduce a way of examining the controllability of a web service. That means, we study whether a controller can actually use the functionality provided by the web service. We propose the interaction graph of a web service, that is modelled by an open workflow net. To verify whether such a net is controllable or not it is sufficient to construct a reduced interaction graph. We will define reduction rules that minimize the size of the graph greatly. The analysis using the interaction graph as well as the reduction rules shown in this paper are implemented and have been integrated into an analysis tool kit for web services.