A Comparative Study of Web Service Composition via BPEL and Petri Nets

Web services technology provides a platform on which we can develop distributed services. The interoperability among these services is achieved by various standard protocols. In recent years, several researches suggested that Petri Nets provide a satisfactory assistance to the whole process of web services development. Business transactions, on the other hand, involve the coordination and interaction between multiple partners. With the emergence of web services, business transactions are conducted using these services. The coordination among the business processes is crucial, so is the handling of faults that can arise at any stage of a transaction. BPEL models the behavior of business process interaction by providing a XML based grammar to describe the control logic required to coordinate the web services participating in a process flow. However BPEL lacks a proper formal description where the composition of business processes cannot be formally verified. Petri Nets, on the other hand, facilitates a formal foundation for rigorous verification of the composition. This paper presents a comparison of web service composition between BPEL and Petri nets.