Zongyan Qiu

Towards the theoretical foundation of choreography

With the growth of interest on the web services, people pay increasinglyattention to the choreography, that is, to describe collaborations ofparticipants in accomplishing a common business goal from a globalviewpoint. In this paper, based on a simple choreography language and arole-oriented process language, we study some fundamental issues relatedto choreography, especially those related to implementation, includingsemantics, projection and natural projection, dominant role in choices anditerations, etc. We propose the concept of dominant role and somenovel languages structures related to it. The study reveals some cluesabout the language, the semantics, the specification and theimplementation of choreography.

Towards the Semantics and Verification of BPEL4WS

In this paper, we discuss the semantics of BPEL4WS language which is a de facto standard for specifying and execution workflow specification for web service composition and orchestration. We propose a language @m-BPEL that includes most primitive and structured activities of BPEL4WS, and define its semantics. As the Timed Automata (TA) is powerful in designing real-time models with multiple clocks and has well developed automatic tool support, we define a map from @m-BPEL into composable TA. Therefore, the properties we want to check can be verified in TA network correspondingly. Furthermore, we prove that the mapping from @m-BPEL to TA is a simulation, which means that the TA network simulates correctly the corresponding @m-BPEL specification. The case study with model checker Uppaal shows that our method is effective, and a Java supporting tool based on Uppaal model checker engine has been developed.

Semantics of BPEL4WS-Like fault and compensation handling

BPEL4WS is one of the most important business process modelling languages. One distinct feature of it is the fully programmable fault and compensation handling mechanism, which allows the user to specify the compensation behaviors of processes in application-specific manners. In this paper, we present a formal operational semantics to a simplified version of BPEL4WS, with some important concepts related to fault and compensation handling proposed and discussed, especially, the compensation closure and the compensation context. We also discuss some insights into the BPEL4WS language and its implementation obtained from this study.

A Formal Model forWeb Service Choreography Description Language (WS-CDL)

We propose a language CDL as a formal model of simplified WS-CDL. The operational semantics of CDL is given, and static validation and verification of choreographies is studied. Some properties of the proposed model are verified using the SPIN model-checker, which illustrates the potential usage and benefits of the formal model

Model checking dynamic UML consistency

UML is widely accepted and extensively used in software modeling. However, using different diagrams to model different aspects of a system brings the risk of inconsistency among diagrams. In this paper, we investigate an approach to check the consistency between the sequence diagrams and statechart diagrams using the SPIN model checker. To deal with the hierarchy structure of statechart diagrams, we propose a formalism called Split Automata, a variant of automata, which is helpful to bridge the statechart diagrams to SPIN efficiently. Compared with the existing work on model checking UML which do not have formal verification for their translation from UML to the model checker, we formally define the semantics and prove that the automatically translated model (i.e. Split Automata) does simulate the UML model. In this way, we can guarantee that the translated model does represent the original model.

Graph transformations for object-oriented refinement

An object-oriented program consists of a section of class declarations and a main method. The class declaration section represents the structure of an object-oriented program, that is the data, the classes and relations among them. The execution of the main method realizes the application by invoking methods of objects of the classes defined in the class declarations. Class declarations define the general properties of objects and how they collaborate with each other in realizing the application task programmed as the main method. Note that for one class declaration section, different main methods can be programmed for different applications, and this is an important feature of reuse in object-oriented programming. On the other hand, different class declaration sections may support the same applications, but these different class declaration sections can make significant difference with regards to understanding, reuse and maintainability of the applications. With a UML-like modeling language, the class declaration section of a program is represented as a class diagram, and the instances of the class diagram are represented by object diagrams, that form the state space of the program. In this paper, we define a class diagram and its object diagrams as directed labeled graphs, and investigate what changes in the class structure maintain the capability of providing functionalities (or services). We formalize such a structure change by the notion of structure refinement. A structure refinement is a transformation from one graph to another that preserves the capability of providing services, that is, the resulting class graph should be able to provide at least as many, and as good, services (in terms of functional refinement) as the original graph. We then develop a calculus of object-oriented refinement, as an extension to the classical theory of data refinement, in which the refinement rules are classified into four categories according to their natures and uses in object-oriented software design. The soundness of the calculus is proved and the completeness of the refinement rules of each category is established with regard to normal forms defined for object-oriented programs. These completeness results show the power of the simple refinement rules. The normal forms and the completeness results together capture the essence of polymorphism, dynamic method binding and object sharing by references in object-oriented computation.

Enforcing Constraints on Life Cycles of Business Artifacts

Artifact-centric business process models allow to describe artifacts (data objects) and their life cycles, which allow designers to focus on individual artifact in business processes, thus simplifies the design and analysis of business process model. However, this feature is a double-edged sword. The description of the relationships between artifacts becomes a new and nontrivial problem. It is better that the associations among business artifacts are specified at a high level as logical assertions. We think taking business constraints as complements of artifact-centric business operational model is an useful idea. Based on this consideration,in this paper, we propose an approach which combines both the declarative way and the procedural way in the construction of business processes. This flexibility can help designers to separate the parts of a business process that are more likely to change from those that are less likely to change. We propose a language TiLE to specify business constraints, and give complexity results on the satisfiability of TiLE. Moreover, we discussed how to enforce the constraints at run-time.

Type checking choreography description language

The Web Services Choreography Description Language (WS-CDL) is a W3C specification developed for the description of peer-to-peer collaborations of participants from a global viewpoint. Currently WS-CDL has no rigorous static type checking. We believe that introducing a type system will exclude many design and description errors, and ensure desirable properties of the choreography specifications. In this paper, we took a core language CDL, which covers most of the important features of the WS-CDL, and is more convenient for the study. We developed the abstract syntax and operational semantics of CDL, and defined a collection of rules which can be used to check if choreography is well-typed. Moreover, we also proved some type safety theorems for CDL in the sense that well-typed choreography cannot get stuck. We show how the use of type information can allow us to gain confidence in the correctness of choreography.

Verifying BPEL-Like Programs with Hoare Logic

The WS-BPEL language has become a de facto standard for modeling Web-based business processes. One of its essential features is the fully programmable compensation mechanism. To understand it better, many works have mainly focused on formal semantic models for WS-BPEL. In this paper, we make one step forward by investigating the verification problem for business processes written in BPEL-like languages. We propose a set of proof rules in Hoare-logic style as an axiomatic verification system for a BPEL-like core language containing key features such as data states, fault and compensation handling. We also propose a big-step operational semantics which incorporates all these key features. Our verification rules are proven sound with respect to this underlying semantics. The application of the verification rules is illustrated via the proof search process for a nontrivial example.

POST: a case study for an incremental development in rCOS

We have recently developed an object-oriented refinement calculus called rCOS to formalize the basic object-orient design principles, patterns and refactoring as refinement laws. The aim is of rCOS is to provide a formal support to the use-cased driven, incremental and iterative Rational Unified Process (RUP). In this paper, we apply rCOS to a step-wised development of a Point of Sale Terminal (POST) system, from a requirement model to a design model, and finally, to the implementation in Visual C#.