Transforming Internal Activities of Business Process Models to Service Compositions

Abstract

As a service composition language, BPEL imposes as constraint that a business process model should consist only of activities for interacting with other business processes. BPEL provides limited support for implementing internal activities, i.e. activities that are performed by a single business process without involvement of other business processes. BPEL is hence not suitable to implement internal activities that include complex data manipulation. There are a number of options to make BPEL able to implement such internal activities. In this paper we analyse those options based on their feasibility, efficiency, reusability, portability and merging. The analysis indicates that delegating internal activities' functionality to other services is the best option. We therefore present an approach for transforming internal activities to service invocations. The application of this approach on a business process model results in a service composition model that consists only of activities for interaction. * This work is part of the Freeband AMUSE project (http://a-muse.freeband.nl) sponsored by the Dutch government under contract BSIK 03025.