Model-Driven Engineering of Web Service Compositions: A Transformation from ISDL to BPEL

An approach to system specification defined by the Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) separates the specification of system functionality from the specification of the implementation of that functionality on a specific platform. To this end, the MDA proposes a framework for transforming a model into another model of the same system. The framework can also be used to transform a model into code for creating a system. Model-Driven Engineering, which combines the MDA with process and analysis, puts the MDA into work in software development. The Interaction Systems Design Language (ISDL) is a modeling language that is aimed at supporting the design of distributed systems. The ISDL allows one to model and to structure a system at higher levels of abstraction. At some level, an ISDL model has to be mapped onto available concrete components to create the system. Web services allows applications within an enterprise to be accessible through the Web by providing an interface that is described in the Web Service Description Language (WSDL). Web services can be further composed to provide a more sophisticated Web service that performs some business process. A language for defining the behavior of a Web service composition is the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS, or BPEL for short). From the perspective of a design process, the WSDL and the BPEL are concrete components for implementing a system being designed. This thesis provides a transformation from ISDL to BPEL using approaches suggested by the MDA, i.e. marking and metamodel transformation. An ISDL profile for business processes modeling with a mapping to the BPEL is developed. In addition, metamodels for the WSDL and the BPEL are developed. The metamodels are used to define transformation specifications from ISDL to WSDL and from ISDL to BPEL. The transformation is able to generate WSDL and BPEL documents from an ISDL model that complies with the profile.