BPEL´n´Aspects: Adapting Service Orchestration Logic

The need for flexibility in process-based applications, in particular during their execution, places the demand for enabling adaptability of processes. AOP is considered to be one of the approaches to flexibly switch on and off functionality on per-instance basis in applications during their execution; analogously, this paradigm can be applied in a BPEL environment to enable adaptation of running orchestrations. In the presented approach we strive towards reuse of as much concepts and technology already available in a Web service (WS) environment as possible. We combine standard BPEL, the publish/subscribe paradigm and WS-Policy so that WS operations play the role of aspects with respect to BPEL processes. We present the syntax for such aspects as an extension of the WS-Policy framework. We introduce the architecture of the supporting infrastructure and a prototypical implementation. The approach draws on the combined benefits of service orientation and the AOP paradigm to improve the state-of-the-art techniques for flexibility of service orchestrations in a non-intrusive manner.