Exception Handling in Message-Based Integration Systems and Modeling Using BPMN

Abstract

Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIP) are a collection of widely used patterns for integrating enterprise applications and business processes. These patterns represent a “de-facto” standard for design decisions when integrating enterprise applications. For the specification of integration scenarios, the patterns’ control and data flow syntax and semantics have been expressed in the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). However, exceptions during message processing are left for further studies. In previous work, we specified common technical, exceptional situations in integration systems and derive exception types, for which we define a compliant representation in BPMN, resulting in general patterns for exception handling and compensation. In addition to the patterns, the Exception Flow was introduced, evaluated syntactically and semantically for representative integration scenarios. In this work, we complement these contributions by extending the exception strategies and patterns, and by adding an evaluation of pattern-based compilation from BPMN-based integration descriptions to an open source integration runtime system.

Optimization Strategies for Integration Pattern Compositions

“…6. The integration scenarios are stored as process models in a BPMN-like notation [40] (similar to Fig. 1).…”

“…2. We now briefly situate our work within the context of other formalizations, beyond the already discussed BPMN [40] and PN [17] approaches. Enterprise Application Integration.…”

“…Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is the centerpiece of current IT infrastructure and integration scenarios, and essentially amounts to composing Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIPs) from a catalog comprising the original patterns [23] and recent additions [37,40]. This can result in complex models that are often vendor-specific, informal and ad-hoc [37]; optimizing such integration processes is desirable, but hard.…”

“…A CRM Material is sent from the CRM system via EDI (more precisely SAP IDOC transport protocol) to an integration process running on SAP Cloud Platform Integration (SAP CPI) 1 . The integration process enriches the message header (MSG.HDR) with additional information based on a document number for reliable messaging (i.e., AppID), which allows redelivery of the message in an exactly-once service quality [40]. The IDOC structure is then mapped to the COD service description and sent to the COD receiver.…”

“…We opt for a high-level representation of pattern compositions as control flow graphs [4] (where the nodes represent extended EIPs) with communication contracts. This allows our representation to specify data and throughput aspects -which BPMN-based models cannot [40] -whilst still modeling the composition logic of the patterns, rather than their internal logic as in Petri Net-based models [17] (answering RQ2). We then formalize the optimization strategies based on the contract graphs using graph rewriting techniques (answering RQ3), and evaluate them on real-world pattern compositions.…”