Using Patterns in the Design of Inter-organizational Systems - An Experience Report

The modeling, design, and implementation of inter-organizational systems (IOS) is a challenging new problem. In contrast to previous systems, where components have clearly defined interfaces and serve a well-defined purpose, components of IOS exist in a distributed environment, where each component of the system may exist at a separate corporation and must conform to the interface of partner components. This creates a complicated problem for designers. In this paper, we investigate to which extent control flow, communication, and data manipulation patterns can help to ease the manual design process of IOS implemented in the Business Process Execution Language for Web services (BPEL4WS). By applying patterns of all three types in an iterative fashion we go from an abstract representation of the example process to a graphical solution with a one-to-one mapping to executable BPEL4WS code.