Automatic derivation of BPEL4WS from IDEF0 process models

Integration definition for function modelling (IDEF0) is one of the most popular notations for modelling business processes. It employs a rather simple and intuitive modelling construct, consisting of boxes representing functions and arrows connecting them signifying flow of information and materials. Web services on the other hand are an emerging technology for implementing distributed systems. Web service orchestration languages, such as Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS), are the emerging approach for describing processes as networks of coordinated web services. Business processes as captured in IDEF0 models, however, may contain both web services as well as other types of activities which need to be coordinated. By automatically analysing the Extensible Markup Language (XML) definition of an IDEF0 model, we can identify how web services interact with other activities and at runtime generate code to support the orchestration of web services with the overall business process. The approach proposed is independent of the orchestration language and ensures an implementation independent model for specifying web service orchestrations. This approach also enables the top-down analysis of a business process to its constituent web services and avoids any misalignment problems during design time between the two.     

Synthy: A system for end to end composition of web services

The demand for quickly delivering new applications is increasingly becoming a business imperative today. However, application development is often done in an ad hoc manner resulting in poor reuse of software assets and longer time-to-delivery. Web services have received much interest due to their potential in facilitating seamless business-to-business or enterprise application integration. A web service composition system can help automate the process, from specifying business process functionalities, to developing executable workflows that capture non-functional (e.g. Quality of Service (QoS)) requirements, to deploying them on a runtime infrastructure. Intuitively, web services can be viewed as software components and the process of web service composition similar to software synthesis. In addition, service composition needs to address the build-time and runtime issues of the integrated application, thereby making it a more challenging and practical problem than software synthesis. However, current solutions based on business web services (using WSDL, BPEL, SOAP, etc.) or semantic web services (using ontologies, goal-directed reasoning, etc.) are both piecemeal and insufficient. We formulate the web service composition problem and describe the first integrated system for composing web services end to end, i.e., from specification to deployment. The proposed solution is based on a novel two-staged composition approach that addresses the information modeling aspects of web services, provides support for contextual information while composing services, employs efficient decoupling of functional and non-functional requirements, and leads to improved scalability and failure handling. We also present Synthy, a prototype of the service composition system, and demonstrate its effectiveness with the help of an application scenario from the telecom domain.     

Petri net based formal analysis for multimedia conferencing services orchestration

Development of services that span over the Internet and Telecom networks is driving significant efforts towards the integrated of services offered by Telecom operators. Service-oriented communication (SOC) is a new trend in the industry to enable communication through a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and thereby package communications as services. In this paper, we firstly introduce the design and implementation for business process execution language (BPEL) based multimedia conferencing communication services orchestration, and mainly focus on the issue of guaranteeing the correctness of such applications, we presents a Petri net-based approach to analyzing the BPEL based multimedian conferencing communication services orchestration correctness and also a set of translation rules is proposed to transform BPEL processes into Petri nets. Especially, we define the correctness of multimedia conferencing services orchestration and address the verification method based on Petri nets. The algorithms and corresponding reliable issues have been proposed, such as the coverability tree for detecting flow safeness, the incidence matrix & state equation for finding reachable issues, and a transitive matrix for detecting a deadlock problem. With the Petri Net Markup Language (PNML) are introduced to transform a orchestrated services into a Petri net model, and providing an automated support for the formal analysis of their behavior. Finally, we give the conclusions.     

Grid Service Orchestration Using the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL)

Modern scientific applications often need to be distributed across Grids. Increasingly applications rely on services, such as job submission, data transfer or data portal services. We refer to such services as Grid services. While the invocation of Grid services could be hard coded in theory, scientific users want to orchestrate service invocations more flexibly. In enterprise applications, the orchestration of web services is achieved using emerging orchestration standards, most notably the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL). We describe our experience in orchestrating scientific workflows using BPEL. We have gained this experience during an extensive case study that orchestrates Grid services for the automation of a polymorph prediction application. Using this example, we explain the extent with which the BPEL language supports the definition of scientific workflows. We then describe the reliability, performance and scalability that can be achieved by executing a complex scientific workflow with ActiveBPEL, an industrial strength but freely available BPEL engine. *The work has been funded by the UK EPSRC through grants GR/R97207/01 (e-Materials) and GR/S90843/01 (OMII Managed Programme).     

Specifying and verifying contract-driven service compositions using commitments and model checking

The paper proposes a novel model checking-based approach towards verifying the compliance of intelligent agent-based web services with contracts regulating their compositions specified in the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL). Unlike the existing approaches in the literature, the main contribution and impact of the introduced approach is the ability to verify intelligent and autonomous composite web services by capturing and describing in details both compliance and violation behaviors, how the system can distinguish between them, and how the system reacts and can be recovered after each violation. The approach encompasses three contributing parts, namely: 1) the marking process of an extended BPEL; 2) the transformation of the extended and marked BPEL to an automata model; and 3) the encoding of the resulting automata model into the Interpreted Systems Programming Language (ISPL), the input language of the MCMAS model checker for intelligent and autonomous multi-agent systems. In the first part, we extend BPEL that specifies the business process of the composition by creating custom activities called labels. We use those labels as means to represent the specifications and mark the points the developer aims to verify. A significant advantage of this labeling is the ability to highlight specific points in the design to be verified and to distinguish compliance behaviors from violations, which makes this verification focused and highly efficient. In the second part, we introduce new transformation rules to transform the extended and marked BPEL to an automata model. This transformation requires a prior modeling of agent-based web services composition using automata definitions. In the third part, we introduce algorithmic translation rules encoding the resulting automata model into ISPL. This translation makes model checking the behavior of our contract-driven compositions possible. A novel characteristic of the proposed approach is the automatic generation of the properties against which the system is verified from the composition’s implementation, which is technically challenging. The verification properties are expressed in the Computation Tree Logic of Commitments (CTLC). Technically, CTLC provides a powerful representation to formally model 1) interactions among multi-agent based web services and 2) compliance and violation behaviors within composite business contracts by making use of communicative commitment operators. CTLC also includes a fulfillment operator which helps formally check the compliance with business contracts and specify the system recovery. A detailed case study from expert and intelligent systems domain along with experimental results are also reported in the paper. Finally, the main impact and significance of the paper on expert and intelligent systems is the ability to use these systems safely since there is a way to verify if the intelligent components behave according to and in compliance with the underlying regulating contracts.     

一种将业务规则与BPEL有效集成的方法

业务规则是定义和约束企业业务结构与业务行为的规定或规范，是企业业务运作和管理决策所依赖的重要资源。当前，面向服务的计算变得越来越流行，Web services已经成为集成互联网上分布和异构应用程序的通用技术。使用Web服务合成语言BPEL可以将不同服务提供者提供的服务整合成新的服务。然而，这种基于流程的合成语言缺乏在合成过程中使用由不同的业务规则引擎管理的业务规则的能力。因此提出了一种将业务规则与BPEL集成的方法。     

Simulation-based experimentation for designing reliable and efficient Web service orchestrations in supply chains

The world today is witnessing a growing interest in conducting supply chain business processes electronically using Web services orchestration technology. Fast adoption is often hampered by the need for experimentation to make efficient use of this technology in supply chain processes. In this paper, a simulation-based approach supporting experimentation with the efficiency and reliability of Web service orchestrations in supply chains prior to implementation are presented. The approach simulates the de facto business process specification standard for Web services, BPEL4WS, using Java-based simulation building blocks. A supply chain case study is used to demonstrate and evaluate the approach.     

面向Web服务的BPEL的研究与实现

BPEL简化了将多个Web服务合成到一个新的复合服务(业务流程)中的操作过程.但如果要进一步提高BPEL流程的开发效率,还需要一个可视化的解决方案.通过一个开发实例的具体实现过程,对基于BPEL进行Web服务合成的原理和方法进行了深入的研究,并由此提出了基于Oracle BPEL流程管理器实现Web服务合成的解决方案,介绍了在该环境下部署和测试一个BPEL流程的方法.     

Automated maintenance of service compositions with SLA violation detection and dynamic binding

Web service compositions need to adapt to changes in their constituent web services, in order to maintain functionality and performance. Therefore, service compositions must be able to detect web service failure and performance degradation resulting in the violation of service-level agreements. Automated diagnosis and repair are equally important. However, existing standards and languages for service compositions, such as BPEL, lack constructs for web service monitoring and runtime adaptability, which are pre-requisites for diagnosis and repair. We present a solution for transparent runtime monitoring, as well as automated performance degradation detection, diagnosis, and repair for service compositions expressed as BPEL processes. Our solution uses lightweight monitoring techniques, supports customizable diagnosis and repair strategies, and is compatible with any standards-compliant BPEL engine.     

Orchestrating Web Services with BPEL

Effective Web services demand careful synchronization on various abstraction levels. The Business Process Execution Language supports modeling and executing business processes from both the user and systems perspectives. In this way, Web services application developers can use BPEL to orchestrate service interactions in a global system view and to manage individual interactions based on outside events. More and more Web service providers are using BPEL to integrate their services independently of vendors and related programming languages. In this column, we introduce BPEL and presents some guidelines for using it in your Web services management.     

A Calculus for Generation, Verification and Refinement of BPEL Specifications

Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (WS-BPEL) is the emerging standard for designing Web Services compositions. In this context, formal methods can contribute to increased reliability and consistency in the BPEL design process. In this paper we propose an approach based on the HAL Toolkit that allows verification of the correctness of the behavior of a π-based specification of interacting Web Services, and generates the BPEL processes that have the same behavior. This correlation based on two-way mapping between the π-based orchestration calculus and BPEL. This approach facilitates the verification and refinement process and may be applied to any BPEL implementation.     

A distributed architecture for policy-customisable multi-tenant processes-as-a-service

Service-based business processes are often developed and deployed by single organisations. In distributed, shared resource environments like the cloud on the other hand, consumers share resources owned by cloud providers. This requires multi-tenancy capability for service processes that provide customised behaviour on shared process implementations to meet the varying needs of different process consumers as tenants of the process resource. In this paper, we define a distributed multi-tenant architecture for Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) processes provided as a service. A single-version BPEL process is deployed by a provider and offered for all process consumers, combined with a customisation and management functionality to create a unique experience for different consumers (process tenants). We provide two core components: a policy model for consumers to express customisation/business requirements of service processes and a coordination framework for policy enforcement between consumers and providers to achieve on-the-fly customisation of service processes.     

服务时间随机条件下服务组合质量分析

本文分析采用业务过程执行语言（BPEL2WS）描述的web服务组合的执行时间,给出在服务执行时间随机情况下,根据单个服务的执行时间概率分布密度和BPEL2WS模型的结构求解web服务组合执行时间的概率分布密度函数的算法。根据概率密度函数可以求得业务过程执行时间在任意时限内的概率,从而可以根据给定的概率条件优化组合服务,使得服务执行成本最低．最后通过一个应用实例验证了算法的有效性。     

网格服务的合成模型研究

开放网格体系结构OGSA规范通过整合网格和Web服务技术确定了网格服务分布式系统框架，但其中关于网格服务合成的方面并没有定义相应的规范，业务流程执行语言BPEL4WS是应用于Web服务上的服务合成规范。通过分析网格服务和Web服务的异同，设计出一种可行的模型，解决了BPEL4WS不支持网格服务中部分特性的问题，从而可以将BPEL4WS应用于网格服务合成上。     

MicroMAIS: executing and orchestrating Web services on constrained mobile devices

Mobile devices with their more and more powerful resources allow the development of mobile information systems in which services are not only provided by traditional systems but also autonomously executed and controlled in the mobile devices themselves. Services distributed on autonomous mobile devices allow both the development of cooperative applications without a back‐end infrastructure and the development of applications blending distributed and centralized services. In this paper, we propose MicroMAIS: an integrated platform for supporting the execution of Web service‐based applications natively on a mobile device. The MicroMAIS platform is composed of mAS and μ‐BPEL. The former allows the execution of a single Web service, whereas the latter permits the orchestration of several Web services according to the WS‐BPEL standard. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.