Title: Advanced verification of distributed WS-BPEL business processes incorporating CSSA-based data flow analysis

Authors: Wolfram Amme, Axel Martens, Simon Moser

Addresses: Institute for Computer Science, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Ernst-Abbe-Platz 2, 07743, Jena, Germany. ' IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, 19 Skyline Drive, Hawthorne, NY, 10532, USA. ' IBM Boblingen Software Laboratory, Schonaicherstr. 220 71031, Boblingen, Germany

Abstract: The business process execution language for web services (WS-BPEL) provides a technology to aggregate encapsulated functionalities for defining high-value web services. For a distributed application in a B2B interaction, the partners simply need to expose their provided functionality as BPEL processes and compose them. Verifying such distributed web service based systems has been a huge topic in the research community lately. However, in most of the work on analysing properties of interacting web services, especially when backed by stateful implementations like WS-BPEL, the data flow present in the implementation is widely neglected and the analysis focuses on control flow only. This might lead to false-positive analysis results when searching for design weaknesses and errors of a given BPEL process. In this paper, we present a method to extract data flow information by constructing a CSSA representation and detecting data dependencies that effect communication behaviour. Those discovered dependencies are used to construct a more precise formal model of the given BPEL process and hence to improve the quality of analysis results.

Keywords: SOA; business process execution language; web services; WS-BPEL; concurrent single static assignment; CSSA; formal verification; data flow analysis; Petri nets; service compatibility; business process integration; business process management; BPEL.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBPIM.2009.026985

International Journal of Business Process Integration and Management, 2009 Vol.4 No.1, pp.47 - 59

Published online: 12 Jul 2009 *

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