BPEL’n’Aspects&Compensation: Adapted Service Orchestration Logic and Its Compensation Using Aspects

One of the main weaknesses of workflow management systems is their inflexibility regarding process changes. To address this drawback in our work on the BPEL’n’Aspects approach we developed a standards-based mechanism to adapt the control flow of BPEL processes [1]. It uses AOP techniques to non-intrusively weave Web service invocations in terms of aspects into BPEL processes. Aspects can be inserted before, instead or after BPEL elements and that way adaptation of running processes is enabled. In this work we want to present a novel extension of the BPEL’n’Aspects prototype that deals with the compensation of weaved-in aspects in a straight-forward manner. The extension enormously improves the applicability of the approach in real-world scenarios: processes in production need the means to compensate behavior that was inserted into the process in the course of adaptation steps. The ability to compensate weaved-in aspects distinguishes our approach from other existing concepts that introduce AOP techniques to business processes.