Modeling and Performance Evaluation of BPEL Processes: A Stochastic-Petri-Net-Based Approach

Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) is considered as the de facto standard for Web service composition. To analyze the performance of composite service processes specified in BPEL gives the way to tell whether the process meets the performance requirements. In this paper, we propose a translation-based approach for performance analysis of BPEL processes, which employs a general stochastic Petri net (GSPN) as the intermediate representation. A set of translation rules is defined for constructs and activities of BPEL so that the processes specified in BPEL can be translated into the GSPN representations. Based on the GSPN representation of BPEL processes, we introduce a state-space method to calculate the expected-process-normal-completion-time as the performance estimate. In the case study, we obtain experimental data and conduct a confidence interval analysis to validate the feasibility and accuracy of the translation-based approach.