High Assurance BPEL Process Models

An increasing number of software applications and business processes are relying upon the use of web services to achieve their requirements. This is due in part to the use of standardized composition languages like the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL). BPEL allows the process designer to compose a procedural workflow from an arbitrary number of available web services and supplemental “programming-like” activities (e.g., assigning values to variables). Such composition languages naturally bring concerns of reliability, consistency, and durability, let alone safety and security. Thus, there is a need for formal specification and analysis of BPEL compositions for high assurance satisfaction. We propose the use of Unified Modeling Language (UML) sequence diagrams as a means for analysis of BPEL process consistency and demonstrate our technique with two examples.