EPC-BASED MODELLING OF BPEL PROCESSES: A PRAGMATIC TRANSFORMATION APPROACH
Jörg Ziemann, Jan Mendling · 2005
The Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL) is frequently used to implement business processes on a technical level. Yet, business process modelling most often starts with the modelling of the business logic of the processes. In this early phase technical details of processes and interfaces are not considered. Consequently, business analysts frequently use graphical modelling languages like Event-Driven Process Chains (EPCs) for this purpose. As these models already include valuable information on the control flow of business activities, it seems more appropriate to transform EPC process models to a technical language like BPEL than starting from scratch again. This motivates our transformation from EPCs to BPEL presented in this paper. We first define a conceptual mapping from EPCs to BPEL that highlights transformation relationships between elements of both languages. This mapping provides the foundation for a transformation program from EPML to BPEL.