A Formal Semantics for the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services

Abstract

We define an abstract operational semantics for the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL) based on the abstract state machine (ASM) formalism. This way, we model the dynamic properties of the key language constructs through the construction of a BPEL abstract machine in terms of a distributed real-time ASM. Specifically, we focus here on the process execution model and the underlying execution lifecycle of BPEL activities. The goal of our work is to provide a well defined semantic foundation for establishing the key language attributes. The resulting abstract machine model provides a comprehensive and robust formalization at three different levels of abstraction.