Defining the Behaviour of BPELlight Interaction Activities Using Message Exchange Patterns

BPELlight is an extension of BPEL that allows defining executable business processes independant of WSDL port types and operations. However, it adopts BPELs principle of having either non-blocking activities that only send or receive a single message or blocking activities, that are restricted to at most two messages, i.e. they implement a send-receive or receive-send behaviour. In recent work BPELlight has been used to define arbitrary complex message exchange patterns. In this paper we use message exchange patterns defined in BPELlight to describe the behaviour of interaction activities in a generic manner. This is beneficial as complex behaviour like a "request-for-bid" only have to be modelled once on an abstract level and can then be reused by simply referencing the corresponding message exchange pattern and filling in parameters whenever needed. This makes process modelling more convenient as the modelling primitives are not restricted to a request-response behaviour but are lifted to a business oriented level.