Question: Do any implementation of BPEL support modification of the processes at Runtime.

Below is a collection of research links on the subject. A google search brings up a couple of things.

• "Extending BPEL for run time adaptability", Karastoyanova, D et al. Sept. 2005. This paper describes the ability to make the bindings to web services more flexible; to be able to bind in different web services on different instances of the process. This choice (flexibility) is made just before the web service is called, so it is really just a way of evaluating the web service destination at the last minute, and not really about changing a choice that has already been made. It does not address changing the process itself at any time, especially not while the process is running.

• "TRAP/BPEL: A Framework for Dynamic Adaptation of Composite Services" - Onyeka Ezenwoye and S. Masoud Sadjadi, Florida International University. This article talks about adding autonomic behavior into existing BPEL processes. TRAP/BPEL does not require any manual modifications to the original BPEL. This paper is about some automatic adjustments that can be made, but does not support arbitrary changes by the authors of the process. It allows for reusable components to be discovered and dynamically integrated to create new applications, but really not about changing the process at runtime.

• "Making BPEL Flexible – Adapting in the Context of Coordination Constraints Using WS-BPEL", Yunzhou Wu, Prashant Doshi, University of Georgia, Although WS-BPEL is emerging as the prominent language for modeling executable business processes, its support for designing flexible processes is limited. An important need of many adaptive processes is for concurrent activities in the process to respect coordination constraints. This is about coordinating activities that are running in parallel. It is not about changing the process while it is running.

• "A reflective approach for dynamic change of BPEL process", Xiangyang Jia et al. Wuhan University, May 2007, However, to the best of our knowledge, few effort from the industry and academia has addressed the dynamic change problems of BPEL process. Some proposal are made int he paper for how to do this. Workflow adaptation is an important research area within workflow community. To achieve adaptability in workflow system, the capability that enables dynamic change of process is always required. Typically, there are two types of changes: ad-hoc changes and evolutionary changes1. The ad-hoc change modifies a single process instance, to cater for specific customer’s demand or to handle unexpected events. The evolutionary change is always performed after the process definition being modified. It shifts all related process instances to a new vision according to the new process definition. This kind of change always aims at dynamic reengineering of workflow. http://www.springerlink.com/content/l84327v25270w558/

• "Making BPEL Processes Dynamic" Sean Carey, Oracle, Fortunately, the BPEL language supports the concept of dynamic binding of partner links. Dynamic binding allows the developer to add new services through configuration or run-time inputs. This approach eliminates the need to anticipate and manage all parent-child relationships at design time. This is again about dynamic binding, but nothing about actually changing the process while it is running.

• "Dynamic Support for BPEL Process Instance Adaptation" Ru Fang et al. IEEE International Conference on Services Computing, July 2008, Most current commercial BPMS products lack the full capability to support changing processes. we propose a system design for the runtime environment to support dynamic instance-level changes. We have implemented a prototype of such a system with the motivating scenarios to demonstrate the usefulness of our proposal.

• http://www.jumpernetworks.com/Making_BPEL_Transformations_Dynamic.pdf