A Model-driven Method to Design SoaML Services from BPMN Models: Principles, Proof-of-concept, and Validation

Abstract

Today's business processes are increasingly complex as they cross organizational boundaries. To execute their business processes, organizations develop software applications called Process-Aware Information System (PAIS). PAIS designers must consider complex scenarios involving multiple partners. Consequently, the architectural design of high quality PAIS is complex and requires vast amounts of knowledge and skills both in software architecture and in the business domain. This paper proposes a model-driven method to design the architecture of PAIS using the service-oriented architecture (SOA) style. The proposed method generates SOA-based design models expressed in SoaML from the specifications of collaborative business processes expressed in BPMN. We developed a prototype tool using the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) ecosystem. We tested the method on a set of processes from the Enterprise Resource Planning literature to assess its effectiveness. Our results show that 80.95\% of the identified services were relevant and corresponded to what architecture specialists expected.