Patterns-based Evaluation of Open Source BPM Systems: The Cases of jBPM, OpenWFE, and Enhydra Shark

In keeping with the proliferation of free software development initiatives and the increased interest in the business process management domain, many open source workflow and business process management systems have appeared during the last few years and are now under active development. This upsurge gives rise to two important questions: what are the capabilities of these systems? and how do they compare to each other and to their closed source counterparts? i.e. in other words what is the state-of-the-art in the area?. To gain an insight into the area, we have conducted an in-depth analysis of three of the major open source workflow management systems - jBPM, OpenWFE and Enhydra Shark, the results of which are reported here. This analysis is based on the workflow patterns framework and provides a continuation of the series of evaluations performed using the same framework on closed source systems, business process modeling languages and web-service composition standards. The results from evaluations of the three open source systems are compared with each other and also with the results from evaluations of three representative closed source systems - Staffware, WebSphere MQ and Oracle BPEL PM, documented in earlier works. The overall conclusion is that open source systems are targeted more toward developers rather than business analysts. They generally provide less support for the patterns than closed source systems, particularly with respect to the resource perspective which describes the various ways in which work is distributed amongst business users and managed through to completion

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

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

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

MicroMAIS: executing and orchestrating Web services on constrained mobile devices

Mobile devices with their more and more powerful resources allow the development of mobile information systems in which services are not only provided by traditional systems but also autonomously executed and controlled in the mobile devices themselves. Services distributed on autonomous mobile devices allow both the development of cooperative applications without a back-end infrastructure and the development of applications blending distributed and centralized services. In this paper, we propose MicroMAIS: an integrated platform for supporting the execution of Web service-based applications natively on a mobile device. The MicroMAIS platform is composed of mAS and μ-BPEL. The former allows the execution of a single Web service, whereas the latter permits the orchestration of several Web services according to the WS-BPEL standard

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

Aspect oriented business process modeling with precedence

Complexity is a major concern which is aimed to be overcome by people through modeling. One way of reducing complexity is separation of concerns, e.g. separation of business process from applications. One sort of concerns are cross-cutting concerns i.e. concerns which are scattered and tangled through one of several models. In business process management, examples of such concerns are security and privacy policies. To deal with these cross-cutting concerns, the aspect orientated approach was introduced in the software development area and recently also in the business process management area. The work presented in this paper elaborates on aspect oriented process modelling. It extends earlier work by defining a mechanism for capturing multiple concerns and specifying a precedence order according to which they should be handled in a process. A formal syntax of the notation is presented precisely capturing the extended concepts and mechanisms. Finally, the relevant of the approach is demonstrated through a case study