Making BPEL flexible: adapting in the context of coordination constraints using WS-BPEL

ABSTRACT

Although WS-BPEL is emerging as the prominent language for modeling executable business processes, its support for designing flexible processes is limited.

An important need of many adaptive processes is for concurrent activities in the process to respect coordination constraints. These require that concurrent activities coordinate their behaviors in response to exogenous events.

We show how coordination inducing constraints may be represented in WS-BPEL, and use generalized adaptation and constraint enforcement models to transform the traditional BPEL process to an adaptive one. The final outcome is an executable WS-BPEL process without extensions, able to adapt to events while respecting coordination constraints between activities.

REFERENCES

• 1: Andrieux, K. Czajkowski, A. Dan, K. Keahey, Ludwig, T. Nakata, J. Pruyne, J. Rofrano, S. Tuecke, and M. Xu. WS-Agreement Specification, 2005.
• 2: Dimka Karastoyanova , Alejandro Houspanossian , Mariano Cilia , Frank Leymann , Alejandro Buchmann, Extending BPEL for Run Time Adaptability, Proceedings of the Ninth IEEE International EDOC Enterprise Computing Conference, p.15-26, September 19-23, 2005 [doi>10.1109/EDOC.2005.14]
• 3: Kunal Verma , Prashant Doshi , Karthik Gomadam , John Miller , Amit Sheth, Optimal Adaptation in Web Processes with Coordination Constraints, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Web Services, p.257-264, September 18-22, 2006 [doi>10.1109/ICWS.2006.97]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.5 On-line Information Services
          Subjects: Web-based services

General Terms:
Algorithms, Theory

Keywords:
adaptation, bpel, coordination, web services