Translating standard process models to BPEL

Standardisation of languages in the field of business process management has long been an elusive goal. Recently though, consensus has built around one process implementation language, namely BPEL, and two fundamentally similar process modelling notations, namely UML Activity Diagram (UML AD) and BPMN. This paper presents a technique for generating BPEL code from process models expressed in a core subset of BPMN and UML AD. This model-to-code translation is a necessary ingredient to the emergence of model-driven business process development environments based on these standards. The proposed translation has been implemented as an open source tool

Pattern-based analysis of UML activity diagrams

The Unified Modelling Language (UML) is a well-known family of notations for software modelling. Recently, a new version of UML has been released. In this paper we examine the Activity Diagrams notation of this latest version of UML in terms of a collection of patterns developed for assessing control flow and data flow capabilities of languages used in the area of process-aware information systems. The purpose of this analysis is to assess relative strengths and weaknesses of control and data flow specification in Activity Diagrams and to identify ways of addressing potential deficiencies. In addition, the pattern-based analysis will yield typical solutions to practical process modelling problems and expose some of the ambiguities in the current UML 2.0 draft specificatio

Patterns-based evaluation of open source BPM systems : the cases of jBPM, OpenWFE, and Enhydra Shark

The abundance of approaches towards business process specification and enactment is well-known and is an ongoing source of confusion. One of the objectives of the Workflow Patterns Initiative is to provide insights into comparative strengths and weaknesses of the state-of-the-art in Process Aware Information Systems (PAISs).Over the past years many approaches to business process specification including commercial offerings, modelling languages, and academic prototypes have been evaluated in terms of the patterns in order to assess their capabilities in terms of expressing control-flow dependencies, data manipulation and resource allocation directives. With the increasing maturity and popularity of open source software it seems opportune to take a closer look at such offerings in the Business Process Management (BPM) area. This report provides a patterns-based evaluation of three well-known open source workflow management systems: jBPM, OpenWFE, and Enhydra Shark

DecSerFlow: Towards a Truly Declarative Service Flow Language

The need for process support in the context of web services has triggered the development of many languages, systems, and standards. Industry has been developing software solutions and proposing standards such as BPEL, while researchers have been advocating the use of formal methods such as Petri nets and pi-calculus. The languages developed for service flows, i.e., process specification languages for web services, have adopted many concepts from classical workflow management systems. As a result, these languages are rather procedural and this does not fit well with the autonomous nature of services. Therefore, we propose DecSerFlow as a Declarative Service Flow Language. DecSerFlow can be used to specify, enact, and monitor service flows. The language is extendible (i.e., constructs can be added without changing the engine or semantical basis) and can be used to enforce or to check the conformance of service flows. Although the language has an appealing graphical representation, it is grounded in temporal logic

QoS-aware Service Composition in Dynamic Service Oriented Environments

International audienceQoS-aware service composition is a key requirement in Service Oriented Computing (SOC) since it enables fullling complex user tasks while meeting Quality of Service (QoS) constraints. A challenging issue towards this purpose is the selection of the best set of services to compose, meeting global QoS constraints imposed by the user, which is known to be a NP-hard problem. This challenge becomes even more relevant when it is considered in the context of dynamic service environments. Indeed, two specic issues arise. First, required tasks are fulfilled on the fly, thus the time available for services' selection and composition is limited. Second, service compositions have to be adaptive so that they can cope with changing conditions of the environment. In this paper, we present an efficient service selection algorithm that provides the appropriate ground for QoS-aware composition in dynamic service environments. Our algorithm is formed as a guided heuristic. The paper also presents a set of experiments conducted to evaluate the efficiency of our algorithm, which shows its timeliness and optimality

On the Suitability of BPMN for Business Process Modelling

In this paper we examine the suitability of the Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) for business process modelling, using the Workflow Patterns as an evaluation framework. The Workflow Patterns are a collection of patterns developed for assessing control-flow, data and resource capabilities in the area of Process Aware Information Systems (PAISs). In doing so, we provide a comprehensive evaluation of the capabilities of BPMN, and its strengths and weaknesses when utilised for business process modelling. The analysis provided for BPMN is part of a larger effort aiming at an unbiased and vendor-independent survey of the suitability and the expressive power of some mainstream process modelling languages. It is a sequel to previous work in which languages including BPEL and UML Activity Diagrams were evaluated

Representation Theory versus Workflow Patterns - The Case of BPMN

Selecting an appropriate process modeling language forms an important task within business process management projects. A wide range of process modeling languages has been developed over the last decades, leading to an obvious need for rigorous theory to assist in the evaluation and comparison of the capabilities of these languages. While academic progress in the area of process modeling language evaluation has been made on at least two premises, Representation Theory and Workflow Patterns, it remains unclear how these frameworks relate to each other. We use a generic framework for language evaluation to establish similarities and differences between these acknowledged reference frameworks and discuss how and to what extent they complement respectively substitute each other. Our line of investigation follows the case of the popular BPMN modeling language, whose evaluation from the perspectives of Representation Theory and Workflow Patterns is reconciled in this paper

Towards a BPMN Semantics Using UML Models

Abstract. Standardization initiatives on the field claim to be a conse-quence of the long expected maturity of Business Process Management (i.e. BPM) market and they try to impose a precise semantics for an unique and common understanding. Standard specifications provide usu-ally less or more informal description of the involved languages. Open-source/proprietary tools often do not succeed to generate an executable code, therefore they could not make a clear distinction between the speci-fication technology they implement and their own requirements. In order to suit these needs and for the sake of a common understanding of the concepts, a high-level modelling of the languages using UML is needed. The aim of this paper is to discuss Service Interaction Patterns directly supported by BPMN 1.1, and to use UML models in order to describe the abstract syntax of the involved concepts. An informal correspondence with WS-BPEL 2.0 elements is provided, together with their associated UML models description. As a consequence of the limited support for Service Interaction Patterns, another purpose of the paper is to discuss the directions in which the BPMN Standard seems to evolve, in order to suit the industry demands.

Life after BPEL?

The Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL) has emerged as a standard for specifying and executing processes. It is supported by vendors such as IBM and Microsoft and positioned as the "process language of the Internet". This paper provides a critical analysis of BPEL based on the so-called workflow patterns. It also discusses the need for languages like BPEL. Finally, the paper addresses several challenges not directly addressed by BPEL but highly relevant to the support of web services