Verifiable Model Construction for Business Processes

Business process specified in Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), which integrates existing services to develop composite service for offering more complicated function, is error-prone. Verification and testing are necessary to ensure the correctness of business processes. SPIN, for which the input language is PROcess MEta-LAnguage (Promela), is one of the most popular tools for detecting software defects and can be used both in verification and testing. In this paper, an automatic approach is proposed to construct the verifiable model for BPEL-based business process with Promela language. Business process is translated to an intermediate two-level representation, in which eXtended Control Flow Graph (XCFG) describes the behavior of BPEL process in the first level and Web Service Description Models (WSDM) depict the interface information of composite service and partner services in the second level. With XCFG of BPEL process, XCFGs for partner services are generated to describe their behavior. Promela model is constructed by defining data types based on WSDM and defining channels, variables and processes based on XCFGs. The constructed Promela model is closed, containing not only the BPEL process but also its execution environment. Case study shows that the proposed approach is effective.

Secure Data Transmission in BPEL (Business Process Execution Language)

In the world of computation, the encryption is a technique by which the plaintext or any type of data which is converted from the readable form is transformed into an encoded form. That encoded form can only be read by another entity if they have corrected key for decryption. The proposed technique providing the security to the data in inefficient way that can be further use in implementation in new upcoming task and enhancement in current running projects of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) BPEL (Business Process Execution Language).

Validating Structural Metrics for BPEL Process Models

Business process models tend to get more and more complex with age, which hurts the ease with which designers can understand and modify them. Few metrics have been proposed to measure this complexity, and even fewer have been tested in the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) context. In this paper, we present three related experimental studies whose aim was to analyse the ability of four selected structural metrics to predict BPEL process model understandability and modifiability. We used Spearman’s rho and regression analysis in all three experiments. All metrics passed the correlation tests meaning that they can serve as understandability and modifiability indicators. Further, four of the metrics passed the regression test for understanding time implying that they can serve as understandability predictors. Finally, only one metric passed the regression test for modification time implying that it can serve as a modifiability predictor.

A New Business Process Verification Approach for E-Commerce Using Petri Nets

The design, modeling, optimization, reengineering, and coupling of business processes in e-commerce environment have gradually become a hot research topic. Business processes must be strictly described and validated by formal methods to ensure their reliability and efficiency. This paper systematically studies the introduction of new business process characteristics into behavioral temporal logic and extend TLA to obtain a new logic system PTLA, which enriches the theoretical system of formal method of business process under the environment of e-commerce. The paper also discusses Petri nets and show how to convert Petri nets into TLA. A parallel Petri net model was built to represent the dynamic, concurrency and flexibility, and cross-organizational e-commerce business process. Finally, the use of simulation to extend the business process execution language BPEL to TLA.

Adaptive BPEL Service Compositions via Variability Management

Service-Oriented Architectures are a popular development paradigm to enable distributed applications constructed from independent web services. When coordinated, web services are an infrastructure to fulfill dynamic and vertical integration of business. They may face frequent changes of both requirements and execution environments. Static and predefined service compositions using business process execution language (BPEL) are not able to cater for such rapid and unpredictable context shifts. The authors propose a variability management-based adaptive and configurable service composition approach that treats changes as first-class citizens and consists of identifying, expressing, realizing, and managing changes of service compositions. The proposed approach is realized with a language called VxBPEL to support variability in service compositions and a platform for design, execution, analysis, and maintenance of VxBPEL-based service compositions. Four case studies validate the feasibility of the proposed approach while exhibiting good performance of the supporting platform.

UML activity diagram transformation into BPEL integration flow

The growing interest of companies in integration and interoperability between information systems has caused increase in significance of Service-Oriented Architecture which provides tools for Enterprise Application Integration. In that architecture, Enterprise Service Bus provides technical possibilities of communication between IT systems. A key element in the communication are integration flows. Objective: The aim of this article is to present a new transformation Integration2BPEL, which automates the development of executable integration flow expressed in the Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) based on the model of the integration flow presented in the Unified Modelling Language (UML) activity diagram. Method: The author proposes a transformation of the type of model-to-code type which generates integration flow expressed in WS-BPEL, which can be executed in any BPEL-compliant process engine. The integration flow is modelled using UML activity diagram with stereotypes from ‘UML Profile for Integration Flows’ profile in an IBM Rational Software Architect (RSA). Using Integration2BPEL transformation a complete, executable integration flow is generated, which is composed of many mediation mechanisms. Generated integration flows have been executed on OpenESB. Results: The ability to generate a complete integration flow in BPEL, which without any additions can be run on enterprise service bus. Implementation phase of an integration flow construction was automated. Each of integration flows is implemented according to the same rules. In addition, it allows to avoid mistakes made by designers and programmers. Conclusions: Model-Driven Development is an approach that leads to the automation of the design and programming phases. Integration2BPEL transformation is a uniform mechanism to design integration flow. Potentially, it also allows to avoid implementation errors. Keywords: Web Services Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), Unified Modelling Language (UML), UML activity diagram, Model-Driven Development (MDD), Transformation. null

Empirical Evaluation of Design Level Metrics for Aspect Oriented Business Process Execution Language in SOA

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) facilitates seamless application integration through standards-based predefined web services. During integration, Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) plays a vital role in composing existing Web Services thereby achieving a service based workflow model. Due to frequently changing business requirements, it becomes very much essential for an SOA application to have the capability to dynamically bind with an alternate service rather than statically fixing the services in a given composition. However, BPEL lacks support for the run-time inclusion of a new Web Service or functionality. Aspects overcome this limitation by providing support to independently encapsulate the cross-cutting functionalities by separating them from the core business logic. Using AOP, it is possible to achieve dynamic binding in web service composition. To illustrate the embedding of AOP constructs into a BPEL process, this paper implements a case study on distributed e-HealthCare system. Further, two core design level properties namely, cohesion and coupling have been measured and the impact of introduction of AO into a composed BPEL process has also been discussed. Empirical evaluation of the design level properties shows that cohesion improves by the introduction of AOP in BPEL.

A user-aware approach for describing and publishing context aware composite Web service

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to describe the composite service and the context properties related to the users in the business process execution language (BPEL) file. Design/methodology/approach The authors’ approach allows expressing requirements by taking into account potential users’ context in addition to the functional one. Findings In this paper, the authors introduce a new context-aware approach that provides a dynamic adaptation of service compositions. Originality/value This paper introduces a user-aware approach for describing and publishing context-aware composite Web service.