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Flow-oriented process modeling languages have a long tradition in the area of Business Process Management and are widely used for capturing activities with their behavioral and data dependencies. Individual events were introduced for triggering process instantiation and activities. However, real-world business cases drive the need for also covering complex event patterns as they are known in the field of Complex Event Processing. Therefore, this paper puts forward a catalog of requirements for handling complex events in process models, which can be used as reference framework for assessing process definition languages and systems. An assessment of BPEL and BPMN is provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When a service engages in multiple interactions concurrently, it is generally required to correlate incoming messages with messages previously sent or received. Features to deal with this correlation requirement have been incorporated into standards and tools for service implementation, but the supported sets of features are ad hoc as there is a lack of an overarching framework from which their expressiveness can be evaluated. This paper introduces a set of patterns that provide a basis for evaluating languages and protocols for service implementation in terms of their support for correlation. The proposed correlation patterns are grounded in a formal model that views correlation mechanisms as means of grouping atomic message events into conversations and processes. The paper also provides an evaluation of relevant standards in terms of the patterns, specifically WS-Addressing and BPEL, and discusses how these standards have and could continue to evolve to address a wider set of correlation scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Web service composition has been the subject of a number of standardisation initiatives. These initiatives have met various difficulties and had mixed degrees of success, and none of them has yet attained both de facto and de jure status. This paper reviews two of these initiatives with respect to a framework wherein service composition is approached from multiple interrelated perspectives. One conclusion is that standardisation initiatives in this area have not been built on top of an explicitly defined overarching conceptual foundation. The paper outlines a research agenda aimed at identifying requirements and concepts that should be addressed by and incorporated into these standards. Keywords: web service, web service composition, standard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs), software systems are decomposed into independent units, namely services, that interact with one another through message exchanges. To promote reuse and evolvability, these interactions are explicitly described right from the early phases of the development lifecycle. Up to now, emphasis has been placed on capturing structural aspects of service interactions. Gradually though, the description of behavioral dependencies between service interactions is gaining increasing attention as a means to push forward the SOA vision. This paper deals with the description of these behavioral dependencies during the analysis and design phases. The paper outlines a set of requirements that a language for modeling service interactions at this level should fulfill, and proposes a language whose design is driven by these requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With increased sophistication and standardization of modeling languages and execution platforms supporting business process management (BPM) across traditional boundaries, has come the need for consolidated insights into their exploitation from a business perspective. Key technology developments in BPM bear this out, with several web services-related initiatives investing significant effort in the collection of compelling use cases to heighten the exploitation of BPM in multi-party collaborative environments. In this setting, we present a collection of patterns of service interactions which allow emerging web services functionality, especially that pertaining to choreography and orchestration, to be benchmarked against abstracted forms of representative scenarios. Beyond bilateral interactions, these patterns cover multilateral, competing, atomic and causally related interactions. Issues related to the implementation of these patterns using established and emerging web services standards, most notably BPEL, are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We provide precise high-level models for eight fundamental service interaction patterns, together with schemes for their composition into complex service-based business process interconnections and interaction flows, supporting software-engineered business process management in multi-party collaborative environments. The mathematical nature of our models provides a basis for a rigorous execution-platform-independent analysis, in particular for benchmarking web services functionality. The models can also serve as accurate standard specifications, subject to further design leading by stepwise refinement to implementations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ODP Enterprise Language concept of Role provides a useful abstraction for behaviour in a context that is independent of how the behaviour is enacted in a run time system. In CORBA implementations of ODP systems a client object reference variable is analogous to a Role - it is a placeholder for an object whose behaviour is specified by an IDL type. The DSTC UML Profile for Enterprise Distributed Object Computing expresses the Role concept as a UML Action, which is a placeholder for behaviour in UML, and has an attribute representing constraints on the objects that may perform the behaviour (fill the Role). CORBA Object reference variables are assigned to object references using some "bootstrapping mechanism", implemented by a programmer, perhaps using a Trader or Naming Service to locate suitable objects. For the first time in UML, the DSTC EDOC Profile allows designers to specify Roles independent of the class of objects that may perform the Roles. Designers also specify which objects are appropriate for filling which Roles. Furthermore the mapping of this Profile to CORBA technology allows automatic generation of Trader query code to bootstrap the object references of a distributed application according to the high-level design, not the whims of the programmer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]