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Web service composition refers to the creation of new (Web) services by combining functionalities provided by existing ones. A number of domain-specific languages for service composition have been proposed, with consensus being formed around a process-oriented language known as WS-BPEL (or BPEL). The kernel of BPEL consists of simple communication primitives that may be combined using control-flow constructs expressing sequence, branching, parallelism, synchronization, etc. We present a comprehensive and rigorously defined mapping of BPEL constructs onto Petri net structures, and use this for the analysis of various dynamic properties related to unreachable activities, conflicting messages, garbage collection, conformance checking, and deadlocks and lifelocks in interaction processes. We use a mapping onto Petri nets because this allows us to use existing theoretical results and analysis tools …