Extending an AOP-enabled BPEL Engine with Support for Compensation of Weaved-in Activities

To comply with everyday requirements, business processes need to be flexible enough to have the ability to be continuously changed to match regularly altering market conditions. Processes modeled in BPEL, the de-facto standard for realizing executable workflows, offer only limited flexibility and allow solely the exchange of the concrete web services used. To overcome this drawback, one approach is to apply the aspect oriented paradigm (AOP), as displayed in BPEL’n’Aspects. Dynamic weaving of aspects into a process allows the alteration of single steps during its execution, hence increasing flexibility. Because error handling is an important issue with business processes in a real life environment, this work explores how BPEL’s concept of compensation can be adapted for aspects when AOP is applied. Within the scope of this work, a viable concept is developed as part of the BPEL’n’Aspects approach to allow the compensation of weaved aspects. An implementation of the developed concept is realized based on an existing prototype.