Mayflower - Explorative Modeling of Scientific Workflows with BPEL

Using workflows for scientific calculations, experiments and simulations has been a success story in many cases. Unfortunately, most of the existing scientific workflow systems implement proprietary, non-standardized workflow languages, not taking advantage of the achievements of the conventional business workflow technology. It is only natural to combine these two research branches in order to harness the strengths of both. In this demonstration, we present Mayflower, a workflow environment that enables scientists to model workflows on the fly using extended business workflow technology. It supports the typical trial-and-error approach scientists follow when developing their experiments, computations or simulations and provides scientists with all crucial characteristics of the workflow technology. Additionally, beneficial to the business stakeholders, Mayflower brings additional simplification in workflow development and debugging

A Classification of BPEL Extensions

The Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) has emerged as de-facto standard for business processes implementation. This language is designed to be extensible for including additional valuable features in a standardized manner. There are a number of BPEL extensions available. They are, however, neither classified nor evaluated with respect to their compliance to the BPEL standard. This article fills this gap by providing a framework for classifying BPEL extensions, a classification of existing extensions, and a guideline for designing BPEL extensions

An event model for WS-BPEL 2.0

This report presents an engine-independent WS-BPEL 2.0 event model. It supports both passive monitoring and active control of process execution by external applications. Some of the assumptions in the presented event model are inspired by a particular implementation, e.g. fault handling and compensation; however they are kept as general as possible, so that they can be mapped on other engine-specific approaches to tackle faults and support compensation. In addition, the report draws on the experience of some of the authors in business process management and software development. The overall BPEL event model consists of a set of event models for the different types of BPEL entities that change their states: processes, process instances, general activities, scope activities, invoke activities, loops, links, variables, partner links, and correlation sets. The event model is used by the authors of the report in several projects, all utilizing process life cycle events in different scenarios