Web services composition is hard but decidable

We study the problem of automatic web service composition. We consider a formal framework where web service business protocols are described by means of Finite State Machines (FSM) and focus on the protocol synthesis problem. We show that this problem can be reduced to that of testing a simulation relation between an FSM and an (infinitely) iterated product of FSMs. While this later problem has never been investigated in the literature, existing results regarding close decision problems in the context of shuffle languages, an extension of regular languages with shuffle and shuffle closure operators, are rather negative and cannot be directly exploited in our context. In this paper, we develop a novel technique to prove the decidability of testing simulation in the case of interest in our setting. As a consequence, our results solve the problem of web service composition (synthesis) existence in presence of an unbounded number of instances, a problem left open in recent related works.

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Source https://hal.science/hal-00678373
Author Ragab, Ramy, Nourine, Lhouari, Toumani, Farouk
Maintainer CCSD
Last Updated May 25, 2026, 01:32 (UTC)
Created May 25, 2026, 01:32 (UTC)
Identifier hal-00678373
Language en
Rights https://about.hal.science/hal-authorisation-v1/
contributor Laboratoire d'Informatique, de Modélisation et d'optimisation des Systèmes (LIMOS) ; Université Blaise Pascal - Clermont-Ferrand 2 (UBP)-Université d'Auvergne - Clermont-Ferrand I (UdA)-SIGMA Clermont (SIGMA Clermont)-Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de St Etienne (ENSM ST-ETIENNE)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
creator Ragab, Ramy
date 2007-12-10T00:00:00
harvest_object_id 37070c8e-686d-4c4d-bf2a-5df28e4873aa
harvest_source_id 3374d638-d20b-4672-ba96-a23232d55657
harvest_source_title test moissonnage SELUNE
metadata_modified 2025-02-20T00:00:00
set_spec type:REPORT