ECEASST Towards Distributed BPEL Orchestrations

Abstract: Web services are imposing as the technology to integrate highly hetero-geneous systems. BPEL, the standard technology to compose services, assumes a single ”orchestrator ” that controls the execution flow and coordinates the interac-tions 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 —exemplified on a simple case study — transforms a centralized BPEL process into a set of co-ordinated 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 com-munication infrastructure based on tuple spaces to make the different orchestrators interact in mobile contexts