Analyzing Service Composition Patterns in BPEL

Web services composition refers to the process of composing several Web services to provide a new value-added service. It is an emerging paradigm for application integration within and across organizational boundaries. BPEL is presently the most prominent language to specify and execute business processes, using Web services as its technological basis. However, BPEL is an XML-based language and may suffer from ambiguity and some erroneous properties. It is feasible to analyze BPEL with some formal methods like Petri nets, which is helpful to clarify the semantics of BPEL. In this paper we discuss some service composition patterns supported in BPEL based on SynchroNet, a special class of Petri nets.