Analyzing BPEL processes using Petri nets

Some years ago, BEA, IBM, Microsoft, SAP AG, and Siebel Systems teamed up and proposed the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL or BPEL4WS) for application integration within and across organizational boundaries. By now, BPEL has become the de facto standard in this Web services composition arena. However, little effort has been dedicated so far concerning the verification of the modeled business processes. For example, there is no support to detect possible deadlocks, or to detect parts of the process that are not viable. For so-called WF-nets (workflow nets), techniques and tools exist which make it possible to detect such anomalies. Therefore, we could detect these anomalies in a BPEL process model provided that we can successfully map this model onto a WF-net. This papers describes a first attempt to map a BPEL process model onto a WF-net. Although not all BPEL constructs have been mapped yet, the results seem promising, as we are able to map typical examples from the BPEL 1.1 specification onto WF-nets.