Preserving Intentions in SOA Business Process Development

Business processes play an important role in Service-Oriented Architectures. Commonly, the business processes are designed in the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), which allows their development even by persons without programming skills. Being abstract and high-level BPMN is not suitable for direct execution, though. The natural choice for implementing business processes is the Business Process Executable Language (BPEL), which is directly executable, but it is also a programming language that requires programming skills in order to be used. This dichotomy is typically solved by transforming BPMN into BPEL. However, this transformation is a complex task. There have been developed a number of transformation methods but their common problem is either incompleteness or loss of intentions, which makes BPEL rather difficult to modify and debug as well as to propagate changes back to BPMN. In this paper we address this problem by presenting a non-trivial enhancement of the existing transformation algorithm [14]. Our approach provides a complete transformation while preserving a large set of intentions expressed in the BPMN description, which makes it also suitable in the context of model-driven development.