Integration of heterogeneous BPM Schemas: The Case of XPDL and BPEL

Heterogeneous Business Process Modeling (BPM) schemas have been a problem for business process management throughout the last couple of years. Although there are several standardization efforts in this area, none of the proposals is commonly accepted as a de facto standard in the industry. Methodological guidance is needed in order to consolidate concurrent schema proposals especially in the BPM ares. This paper discusses the applicability of schema integration for this purpose. We use the case of integrating XPDL 2.0 and BPEL 2.0 to highlight that schema integration is not able to cope with heterogeneous control flow representation of BPM schemas. As a consequence, we extend the schema integration process with a Schema Refactoring step that builds on the identification of transformation functions between schema constructs. This step leads to integrated BPM schemas with less constructs and that include only one control flow representation paradigm.