Applying model checking to BPEL4WS business collaborations

Web services are a very appropriate communication mechanism to perform distributed business processes among several organisations. These processes should be reliable, because a failure in them can cause high economic losses. In this work we propose a framework for the verification of business processes, called VERBUS. Its aim is to help the designer to find errors in specifications at design time, thus increasing their reliability. Contrary to verification frameworks previously proposed for business processes, VERBUS is a modular an extensible framework, in the sense that it is not tied to specific process definition languages or verification tools. This is achieved with the definition of an intermediate formalism that disconnects definition languages from verification tools. In this paper we present VERBUS, and its prototype, that integrates the BPEL4WS definition language and the Spin and SMV verification tools.