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Modeling Service Orchestrations with a Rule-enhanced Business Process Language

Description

Presentation of a CASCON 2009 paper:

Business process modeling has been a promising direction in developing service compositions, including both service orchestrations and choreographies. This paper fully focuses on the problem of modeling service orchestrations. Despite many promising aspects of using business process modeling (BPM) languages for modeling service orchestrations, this paper aims to demonstrate that: i) best practices (workflow patters) for control flows (primary concern of service orchestrations) are not fully covered in present languages; ii) complete service compositions cannot be completely generated from business process models; and iii) BPM languages have limited support for representing logical expressions, business vocabularies, and business rules, which severely limits their flexibility and expressiveness. To address these challenges, we have integrated business rule mod-eling constructs of the REWERSE Rule Markup Language (R2ML) with the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), resulting in our rBPMN proposal.

Transcript

Modeling Service Orchestrations with a Rule-enhanced Business Process Language Milan Milanović 1 , Dragan Gašević 2 , Gerd Wagner 3 , and Vladan Deved žić 1 1 University of Belgrade, Serbia 2 Athabasca University, Canada 3 Brandenburg University of Technology, Germany Problem Domain

• Process modeling and service composition

• Orchestrations

• Business processes from one participant’s side

• Choreographies – MODELS 2009

• Business processes from a global perspective

Orchestration Modeling

• Available languages (e.g., BPMN)

• Challenges

• to support business vocabularies

• to define message typing

• to formalize a language for defining conditions

• to support dynamic changes of business processes

MODELS 2009

• Extension of BPMN

• building on the previous related work

• AORML [Taveter, 2004]

• adding support for vocabularies and rules

• rules and business processes

• everything to be modeled by rules

• hybrid approaches

• definition by metamodeling

Approach MODELS 2009

• Rule-enhanced BPMN – rBPMN

• support for modeling orchestrations

• evaluation mechanism – expressiveness

• workflow patterns

Result MODELS 2009 BPMN Language MODELS 2009 Submission by BEA, IBM, SAP, and Oracle http://www.omg.org/cgi-bin/doc?bmi/08-02-06

• REWERSE I1 Rule Markup Language

• with a UML-based graphical concrete syntax

Rule Modeling MODELS 2009

• REWERSE I1 Rule Markup Language

Extension for Rule Models MODELS 2009 Workflow Patterns

• Exclusive choice pattern

MODELS 2009 Workflow Patterns

• Milestone pattern

EDOC 2009 On a customer book request, if the requested book is available and its quantity is > 0, send the book available message with book price. Otherwise, send a book not avilable message. Book request scenario Expressiveness comparison

• Workflow Patterns

• Integration of rules and processes – rBPMN

• Externalizing business logic in rules

• Not a language for business analysts

• Intermediary between informal (PPT and visio) and technical (SoaML)

• Increases the level of agility

• service interaction and message exchange patterns

Conclusion MODELS 2009 Future Work

• Support for new class of agility of patterns

• Additional scenarios for other types of rules

• Verbalization of rules (SBVR)

• Usability vs. expressivity

• Transformations into extended BPEL

• rBPMN model checking (e.g., mCRL2/mCRL)

Thank you! Questions?