Towards Distributed BPEL Orchestrations

Abstract

Web services are imposing as the technology to integrate highly heterogeneous
systems. BPEL, the standard technology to compose services, assumes a
single âorchestratorâ that controls the execution flow and coordinates the interactions
with selected services. This centralized approach simplifies the coordination
among components, but it is also a too heavy constraint. To this end, the paper
introduces the idea of distributed orchestrations and presents a proposal to couple
BPEL and distributed execution in mobile settings. The approach âexemplified
on a simple case studyâ transforms a centralized BPEL process into a set of coordinated
processes. An explicit meta-model and graph transformation supply the
formal grounding to obtain a set of related processes, and to add the communication
infrastructure among the newly created processes. The paper also presents a communication
infrastructure based on tuple spaces to make the different orchestrators
interact in mobile contexts.
Keywords: WS-BPEL, Graph