Advanced verification of distributed WS-BPEL business processes incorporating CSSA-based data flow analysis

Abstract

The Business Process Execution Language for Web Services WS-BPEL provides an technology to aggregate encapsulated functionalities for defining high-value Web services. For a distributed application in a B2B interaction, the partners simply need to expose their provided functionality as BPEL processes and compose them. Verifying such distributed web service based systems has been a huge topic in the research community lately - cf. [4] for a good overview. However, in most of the work on analyzing properties of interacting Web Services, especially when backed by state-ful implementations like WS-BPEL, the data flow present in the implementation is widely neglected, and the analysis focusses on control flow only. This might lead to false-positive analysis results when searching for design weaknesses and errors, e. g. analyzing the controllability [14] of a given BPEL process. In this paper, we present a method to extract data flow information by constructing a CSSA representation and detecting data dependencies that effect communication behavior. Those discovered dependencies are used to construct a more precise formal model of the given BPEL process and hence to improve the quality of analysis results. © 2007 IEEE.