Workflow pattern analysis in web services orchestration: The BPEL4WS example

Web Services are becoming the prominent paradigm for distributed computing and electronic business. Web services composition is an emerging paradigm for enabling application integration within and across organization boundaries and for building complex Value Added Services (VAS). Different languages are emerging to describe web services composition, but no effort has been dedicated to systematically evaluating the capabilities and limitations of these languages and to formally define their constructs semantics, in order to allow a well defined execution of pattern describing web services interactions. The work of this paper intends to analyze in-depth the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS), presenting a new methodology used to state in a formal way which workflow patterns can be executed by using the BPEL4WS constructs.