Guiding the Service Composition Process with Temporal Business Rules

Service composition has become an important paradigm for building distributed applications and e-business processes. While effort has been reported to verify a posteriori whether a given composition such as a BPEL schema satisfies the predefined behavioural properties, little effort has been made to utilise the properties to assist the designer in developing a correct service composition in the first place. This paper reports our first attempt towards this goal by presenting a framework and associated techniques to provide automated guidance to the designer during the composition design process. The guidance can be suggestions on the next valid steps in the business process, identifications of missing/misplaced steps, and/or propositions for inserting, deleting or reordering activities. The guidance is provided based on the temporal business rules which state the temporal/sequential relationships between business activities.