An application of BPEL for service orchestration in an industrial environment

Traditionally, the application of services can be attributed to so-called office automation. While opening new horizons in software development life cycle, web services have gained increased attention in other domains as well, including the domain of factory automation (software development for factory automation). Coming from pure software to the physical realm involving industrial equipment, the application of web services sets some additional demands for these domains where no simple roll-back or application recovery procedures can easily be implemented due to operations on the states in the physical world. This paper discusses orchestration of web services with BPEL and a set of software tools for developing BPEL processes considered for a simple case study. The example is taken from the domain of factory automation in order to highlight some of the main issues arising during the process of service orchestration.