Visualization of complex BPEL models

Abstract

In this work, we present our approach for producing layouts of complex workflows given in the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) [1]. BPEL is a verbose, hierarchical workflow language containing nested, alternative and concurrent execution paths. Our approach enhances the Sugiyama algorithm [2] by introducing special paths, which are constrained to be drawn in parallel, and hence, orthogonally to the layers in the Sugiyamamodel. To prove the feasibility of our approach,we have developed an extension to the collaborative BPEL development system HOBBES [3] [4]. Collaboration enhances the need for visualizations of complex workflow models, as team members have to coordinate their activities. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.