A non-Markovian stochastic Petri net-based approach to performance evaluation of ontology-based service composition

The Ontology Web Language (OWL)-based web service ontology is one of the major standards for modeling and description of distributed service composition. To analyze the performance of composite service, processes specified in OWL-S give way to tell whether the process meets the performance requirements and to choose the process with higher efficiency from those with similar function. In this paper, we propose a stochastic Petri net-based approach for performance analysis of OWL-S processes, which employs non-Markovian stochastic Petri nets as the intermediate representation. The main innovation of this research includes a translation from OWL-S to non-Markovian stochastic Petri nets and a performance (using expected-process-normal-completion-time as the metric) analysis method. We also validate the correctness of the approach in the case study by showing 90% CI obtained from experimental results that cover corresponding theoretical prediction values. Copyright (c) 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.