Generating BPEL from BPMN

The first Oryx extension comes from the University of Stuttgart. Kerstin Pfitzner wrote her Diploma thesis on transforming BPMN to BPEL4Chor. As part of that she implemented plugins to Oryx.

While BPMN and BPEL already have quite some overlap in language constructs, some fundamental challenges arise when transforming a graph-structured language to a block-structured one. Researchers from the Queensland University of Technology provided the foundation for Kerstin's work. While they focused on the central control flow constructs, Kerstin also covers OR-joins, multiple start events, data flow and exception handling.

As the idea was to generate fully specified BPEL4Chor choreographies, Kerstin added quite some features of BPEL4Chor to BPMN. E.g. pool sets indicate that multiple participants of the same type are present and termination handlers allow reactions to forced termination of subprocesses. Therefore, Kerstin came up with a separate stencil set.

BPEL4Chor choreographies are a collection of BPEL processes for each participant type glued together by a topology. See below for further reading.

Check out Kerstin's presentation as video.


Direct access

The editor incorporating the transformation functionality can currently be found at http://www.bpel4chor.org/editor/.

Further reading