Identification of Potentially Unpredictable Behavior in the Execution of Service Orchestrations

The structure of business processes can vary significantly, encompassing complex behaviors that can become intricate and challenging to track or validate. This paper examines the constructs provided by the Web Services Business Process Execution Language standard that can be utilized to design possibly complex business process executions. It then identifies categories of potentially unpredictable behaviors, such as unintended parallelization or unwanted bottlenecks. The identified behaviors and proposed techniques for their early detection can serve as the basis for employing different further verification techniques. Furthermore, these behaviors can also be used as a reference for identifying similar behaviors in orchestrations of modern microservices, given the conceptual similarities in integrating such microservices into business processes.