BPEL2DENEB: Translation of BPEL Processes to Executable High-Level Petri Nets

The use of the Service-Oriented Architecture paradigm (SOA) as an architectural model together with the use of Web services technologies have spread out widely in the world of business processes. The Business Execution Language, BPEL, represents one of the most common orchestration languages used to build SOA compositions. Using BPEL, a business process can be constructed integrating different Web services in the same process flow. However, BPEL is rather static and several approaches have been proposed in order to allow translating it to a set of different formalisms, being Petri nets one of the most extended. The main lack of these translations is that the result is also static and normally it is used merely to analyze, verify and study some behavioral and structural properties of the corresponding processes. In this work, we present the translation of BPEL processes to executable High-level Petri nets. The resulting nets are much more expressive and keep the original semantics and behavior than the original BPEL process. Moreover, these nets can not only be analyzed, but also executed directly by using the result as input in the DENEB platform for the development and execution of dynamic Web processes.