CA-BPEL: A New Approach to Facilitate the Development and Execution of Context-Aware Service Orchestrations

Abstract

The proliferation of smartphones and sensor-based networks has led to a greater need for context-aware applications and pervasive business processes. One of the key approaches that seek to satisfy this need is context-aware service composition. Service composition can be achieved in two ways, i.e., service choreography and service orchestration. Embedding the context into an orchestrated composite service enhances its flexibility, but makes its development and execution more complicated. This study aims to reduce this complexity by introducing the CA-BPEL approach. Our proposed approach enables developers to turn a standard orchestrated service into a context-aware orchestrated service, consistent with the standard WS-BPEL language. This study applies the Design Science Research Methodology, in which we evaluate CA-BPEL by using a tourism demonstration along with the conduction of a usability survey that shows the convenience of the proposed approach. We also compare our proposed approach with 14 related studies. Our investigations suggest that CA-BPEL has much potential to facilitate the development and execution of context-aware service compositions.