A pattern-based approach to business process modeling and implementation in web services

There are often three groups of experts involved in the design and implementation of business processes in a service oriented enterprise; business analysts, solution architects and system developers. They collaborate with each other to transform a high-level design created by a business analyst to a final executable workflow, based on a service composition language such as the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL). In this paper, we present a new approach to support and semi-automate this transformation process, thus producing applications of higher quality in shorter time. The idea is to capture existing knowledge in the enterprise, which is required for transforming models from one abstraction level to another, as reusable, parameterized patterns. These patterns are used for tool based model transformations of the business processes. To support our approach, we shall make use of Domain Specific Modeling Languages (DSMLs) designed for each enterprise to capture models of a business process at different levels of abstraction, each suitable for the use of one of the groups of experts. The presented approach bridges the gap between business and IT by providing customizable language-, tool- and transformation support for the different groups of experts within the enterprise and is illustrated by an example.