Assuring Consistency of Business Process Models and Web Services Using Visual Contracts

  • Gregor Engels
  • Baris Güldali
  • Christian Soltenborn
  • Heike Wehrheim
Conference paper
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 5088)

Abstract

Business process models describe workflows by a set of actions together with their ordering. When implementing business processes within a service-oriented architecture, these actions are mapped to existing IT (web) services, which are then to be executed in the order specified by the business process. However, the execution of a web service can require certain preconditions to be fulfilled. These might not hold at the time of execution specified in the business process model: it can be inconsistent with the web service specification.

In this paper we propose a technique for checking consistency of process models with web service specifications. To this end, both are equipped with a formal semantics (in terms of graph transformations). We show how to use an existing model checker for graph transformation systems to carry out the consistency check.

Keywords

Business processes web services UML Activities visual contracts graph transformations 
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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008

Authors and Affiliations

  • Gregor Engels
    • 1
    • 2
  • Baris Güldali
    • 2
  • Christian Soltenborn
    • 1
  • Heike Wehrheim
    • 1
  1. 1.Institut für InformatikUniversität PaderbornGermany
  2. 2.Software Quality Lab (s-lab)Universität PaderbornPaderbornGermany

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