Towards the Semantics and Verification of BPEL4WS

In this paper, we discuss the semantics of BPEL4WS language which is a de facto standard for specifying and execution workflow specification for web service composition and orchestration. We propose a language μ-BPEL that includes most primitive and structured activities of BPEL4WS, and define its semantics. As the Timed Automata (TA) is powerful in designing real-time models with multiple clocks and has well developed automatic tool support, we define a map from μ-BPEL into composable TA. Therefore, the properties we want to check can be verified in TA network correspondingly. Furthermore, we prove that the mapping from μ-BPEL to TA is a simulation, which means that the TA network simulates correctly the corresponding μ-BPEL specification. The case study with model checker Uppaal shows that our method is effective, and a Java supporting tool based on Uppaal model checker engine has been developed.