Expressiveness of Workflow Description Languages

This paper defines and classifies a set of expressive properties that we consider to be important for adequately specifying the behaviour of one of the parties in a collaborative procurement process. These properties are derived from an eprocurement case study and can be regarded as requirements for any workflow language intended for EAI or B2Bi application integration. These required properties can be used to evaluate the expressive power of any workflow language that is used to model business processes. We evaluate the recent BPEL4WS proposal as an example and find that while BPEL4WS can express many of the required properties quite naturally, there are others that are difficult or awkward to express in BPEL4WS.

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