A User-Centered Approach to Modeling BPEL Business Processes Using SUCD Use Cases

BPEL is being widely used to specify business processes through the orchestration, composition and coordination of web services. It is now common practice to begin the process of modeling the work ows within a set of BPEL business processes using UML Activity Diagrams since they can be automatically mapped down onto BPEL code. However activity diagrams were not intended to explicitly model user goals and interactions with external systems o ering web services. However, since the chief purpose of BPEL business processes is to rst and foremost provide services to their users, using activity diagram modeling alone will not allow an E-commerce analyst to explicitly capture and model the users' goals. In this paper we propose an approach to solve this issue; initially model BPEL business processes using Use Cases to capture users' perspective, and to systematically develop activity diagrams from Use Case models. A Travel Agency system case study is presented illustrates the feasibility of the proposed approach.