Toward the Formalization of BPEL

Abstract

During the recent years, the composition, the orchestration and the interaction of web services have generated a great deal of interest for the Internet community. BPEL is the most important standard language for web services orchestration. It provides a variety of constructors allowing to build complex services from simple ones. However, many of its features are complex and source of a large misunderstanding due to the absence of formalization. For instance, understanding the Event Handler, the Fault Handler, the Compensation Handler and the Termination Handler (EFCT) of BPEL is a big challenge even for an experienced programmer.This paper aims to formalize the EFCT fragment of BPEL using a process algebra called AV-BPEL specially defined to fit with the BPEL language and endowed with a small steps operational semantics.