Interaction Modeling Using BPMN
Process choreographies describe interactions between different business partners and the dependencies between these interactions. While different proposals were made for capturing choreographies at an implementation level, it remains unclear how choreogra
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Hasso-Plattner-Institute, University of Potsdam, Germany [email protected] 2 SAP Research Centre, Brisbane, Australia [email protected]
Abstract. Process choreographies describe interactions between different business partners and the dependencies between these interactions. While different proposals were made for capturing choreographies at an implementation level, it remains unclear how choreographies should be described on a conceptual level. While the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is already in use for describing choreographies in terms of interconnected interface behavior models, this paper will introduce interaction modeling using BPMN. Such interaction models do not suffer from incompatibility issues and are better suited for human modelers. BPMN extensions are proposed and a mapping from interaction models to interface behavior models is presented.
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Introduction
The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN [1]) is the de-facto standard for business process modeling. It is mainly used for capturing activities, decision responsibilities, control and data flow in business process within one organization. However, in cross-organizational settings we concentrate on the interaction behavior between the different partners involved. The individual partners can internally implement processes as they like as long as their interaction behavior conforms to the choreography that is agreed upon. Especially when relying on electronic messages as means for interaction between different partners, an exact definition of message formats and interaction sequences is of major importance. BPMN can already be used for choreography modeling by expressing interconnected interface behavior models. However, this modeling style leads to redundant control flow dependencies and the danger of incompatible processes. An example for such incompatibility would be a supplier who waits for the payment to arrive before delivering the purchased goods. The buyer, on the other hand, waits for the goods to be delivered before actually paying for them. Both partners would wait endlessly – a classical deadlock situation. Interaction models avoid these problems by describing control flow dependencies between interactions. This means that a particular control flow dependency is not explicitly assigned to any of the partners in the model. Another drawback of redundancy is that modelers need more time for creating and understanding the models. It has turned out that interaction modeling allows faster creation and understanding by human modelers. A. ter Hofstede, B. Benatallah, and H.-Y. Paik (Eds.): BPM 2007 Workshops, LNCS 4928, pp. 208–219, 2008. c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008
Interaction Modeling Using BPMN
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There are different language proposals for interaction modeling, e.g. the Web Service Choreography Description Language (WS-CDL [9]) and Let’s Dance [11]. WS-CDL operates on an implementation level and only comes with a textual syntax. Let’s Dance has a graphical notation, however, it is very different t
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