Applying Formal Methods to SOA and SaaS Service Compositions for ERP Systems

Abstract

Service oriented architectures (SOA) and software as a service (SaaS) models are accelerating the use of the service concept. They have been rapidly adopted by enterprise resource planning (ERP) providers and offers to organizations modern environments favorable for making strategic decisions. However, as the SaaS concept is often confused with the SOA one, a solution is needed to clarify this problem before moving to the introduction of a framework that aggregates several services. Moreover, most of the services-based solutions rely on a particular composition and only a few are equipped with appropriate formal tools for automating the service verification. They focus on specific formal models and are based on particular properties. This article proposes a formal framework that reveals a set of general steps starting from defining the service composition before shifting to the use of the chosen formal methods so as to verify the ERP system properties.