A Method for Analyzing and Predicting Reliability of BPEL Process

Abstract

As an important means to compose independent services together to fulfill a function, service composition is widely applied in different applications. However, the process of composition is complex and error-prone, which makes a formal modeling and analysis method highly desirable. A BPEL process based on Petri net (BPEL-Net) model is presented in this paper, which is capable of capturing behavior of the participating services accurately. A set of rules are proposed to convert atomic activity and structural activity of BPEL process into BPEL-Net model, the transactional properties of services and failure processing between services are also characterized by BPEL-Net. Based on the states of constructed BPEL-Net, we advance the concept of transfer matrix to analyze reliability and related properties. What’s more, we put forward two simplification schemas for BPEL- Net. Finally, a specific example is given to simulate analytical process with tool Matlab, the results show that the method can be a good solution to analyze the reliability of BPEL processes.