In: Proceedings of Grid and Cooperative Computing - GCC 2004: Third International Conference, Wuhan, China, October 21-24, 2004, pages 193-pp. Volume 3251 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science / Hai Jin, Yi Pan, Nong Xiao, et al. (Editors) --- Springer-Verlag, October 2004.
Abstract: Web services provide a language-neutral, loosely-coupled, and platform-independent way for linking applications within organizations or enterprises across the Internet. In such a scenario, quantitative characteristics such as service execution throughput should be evaluated to measure the system performance. Usually, the first step is to define an abstract workflow model, for example Stochastic Petri Net Models. However, large system always raises the problem of state explosion. In this paper, we discuss a set of simplification rules for five basic structures of web service flow: sequential, parallel, conditional, loop and mutex. Our approach can effectively reduce the state space and is applied to the performance analysis of a web service flow management system.