Several methods for enterprise systems analysis rely on flow-oriented representations of business operations, otherwise known as business process models. The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is a standard for capturing such models. BPMN models facilitate communication between domain experts and analysts and provide input to software development projects. Meanwhile, there is an emergence of methods for enterprise software development that rely on detailed process definitions that are executed by process engines. These process definitions refine their counterpart BPMN models by introducing data manipulation, application binding, and other implementation details. The de facto standard for defining executable processes is the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL). Accordingly, a standards-based method for developing process-oriented systems is to start with BPMN models and to translate these models into BPEL definitions for subsequent refinement. However, instrumenting this method is challenging because BPMN models and BPEL definitions are structurally very different. Existing techniques for translating BPMN to BPEL only work for limited classes of BPMN models. This article proposes a translation technique that does not impose structural restrictions on the source BPMN model. At the same time, the technique emphasizes the generation of readable (block-structured) BPEL code. An empirical evaluation conducted over a large collection of process models shows that the resulting BPEL definitions are largely block-structured. Beyond its direct relevance in the context of BPMN and BPEL, the technique presented in this article addresses issues that arise when translating from graph-oriented to block-structure flow definition languages.

The business process modelling notation (BPMN) is a graph-oriented language in which control and action nodes can be connected almost arbitrarily. It is supported by various modelling tools but so far no systems can directly execute BPMN models. The business process execution language for Web services (BPEL) on the other hand is a mainly block-structured language supported by several execution platforms. In the current setting, mapping BPMN models to BPEL code is a necessary step towards unified and standards-based business process development environments. It turns out that this mapping is challenging from a scientific viewpoint as BPMN and BPEL represent two fundamentally different classes of languages. Existing methods for mapping BPMN to BPEL impose limitations on the structure of the source model. This paper proposes a technique that overcomes these limitations. Beyond its direct relevance in the context of BPMN and BPEL, this technique addresses difficult problems that arise generally when translating between flow-based languages with parallelism

The business process modeling notation (BPMN) is a graph-oriented language primarily targeted at domain analysts and supported by many modeling tools. The business process execution language for Web services (BPEL) on the other hand is a mainly block-structured language targeted at software developers and supported by several execution platforms. Translating BPMN models into BPEL code is a necessary step towards standards-based business process development environments. This translation is challenging since BPMN and BPEL represent two fundamentally different classes of languages. Existing BPMN-to-BPEL translations rely on the identification of block-structured patterns in BPMN models that are mapped onto structured BPEL constructs. This article advances the state of the art in BPMN-to-BPEL translation by defining methods for identifying not only perfectly block-structured fragments in BPMN models, but quasi-structured fragments that can be turned into perfectly structured ones and flow-based acyclic fragments that can be mapped onto a combination of structured constructs and control links. Beyond its direct relevance in the context of BPMN and BPEL, this article addresses issues that arise generally when translating between graph-oriented and block-structured flow definition languages.