The Safety Issue in a Web Travel Booking Services Scenario Based on Business Process Execution Language

In the Business Process modeling area, the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) seems to be gaining ground in favor of its other competitors. The simplicity of the protocol coupled with its ability to hide the complex mechanisms that lie underneath along with advanced control features and integration with other concrete standards as XPath and XSLT have contributed to its acceptance. BPEL has been thoroughly investigated in literature as a solution to workflow management in an enterprise environment. In this paper, an intrinsic property of BPEL, related to compensation handling, is investigated as an alternative approach to two-phase commit used in distributed transactions. The applicability of the proposed solution is demonstrated on a travel booking scenario and interesting conclusions are drawn regarding the system’s response in cases of service failures.