Dynamic Discovery and Binding of Web Services to Abstract Web Process Flows

Translating high-level business process flows--created by business analysts--to executable flows is often manual and time consuming. Service oriented architectures, enabled by Web services, show promise in enabling a more automatic translation process. While some work has been done to address this gap, the prior work does not provide flexible ways of discovering services and does not accommodate the inter-service dependencies that might exist while binding services to a high-level workflow process. In this paper, we present a novel approach to dynamically discover suitable services from a UDDI registry and to automatically bind them to abstract business process flows represented in BPEL. Our contributions are two fold: First, we present a way to dynamically bind services to abstract business process flows while considering inter-service dependencies and domain constraints. Second, we present a flexible mechanism to enhance UDDI’s service discovery function. Using our approach, users can integrate multiple external matching services with a UDDI registry to support multiple external service description languages. The result is a system that enables business analysts to focus on creating appropriate high-level flows, while providing application developers with the tools required to translate these high-level flows into executable flows.