VxBPEL: Supporting variability for Web services in BPEL

Web services provide a way to facilitate the business integration over the Internet. Flexibility is an important and desirable property of Web service-based systems due to dynamic business environments. The flexibility can be provided or addressed by incorporating variability into a system. In this study, we investigate how variability can be incorporated into service-based systems. We propose a language, VxBPEL, which is an adaptation of an existing language, BPEL, and able to capture variability in these systems. We develop a prototype to interpret this language. Finally, we illustrate our method by using it to handle variability of an example. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.