Model-based development of executable business processes for web services

Abstract

In order to implement business processes, the composition of simpler services provided by different independent participants requires a high degree of standardization and flexibility. For this purpose, platform-independent XML-based languages like the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS) are suitable. XML documents are in fact human readable, but in general they are hard to produce and to understand by business experts which are, however, most qualified for defining business processes. We present a model-based development method based on an intuitive and adequate modelling notation, an automatic transformation of process models to their XML-based encoding, and techniques to analyze processes. In this context the Unified Modeling Language (UML) as standard notation for modelling software, graph transformation as meta language for defining model transformations, and a semantic interpretation of process models in terms of Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) are used. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.