Translating shared state based ebXML BPSS models to WS-BPEL

Business-to-Business integration (B2Bi) as a core concept of Supply Chain Management (SCM) is a key success factor for enterprises today. Frequently, choreography models are used for agreeing about the overall message exchanges among integration partners while executable orchestration models derived from the choreography govern the local message flow of each individual participant. Today, ebXML BPSS (ebBP) as a dedicated B2Bi choreography language and WS-BPEL as the de-facto standard for Web service based orchestration modeling provide the technological basis for integrating choreographies and orchestrations in the B2Bi domain. This paper introduces the concept of partner-shared states into ebXML BPSS (ebBP) choreography modeling in order to enable complex integration scenarios and shows how to implement these using Web services and WS-BPEL technology. Shared states explicitly represent the effect of business document exchanges, provide natural synchronization points for attaching admissible message exchange actions, and allow for controlling distributed timeouts as well as comprehensibly communicating the interaction’s progress. We provide a workaround for modeling shared states in an ebBP schema compliant way as well as an ebBP schema extension that enables intuitive and straightforward models. A formalization of shared state-based ebBP models is introduced as concise basis for automatically translating extension-based ebBP models into workaround-based ebBP models. An operational semantics for shared state-based ebBP models using this formalization is utilized for comprehensibility because ebBP itself does not define clear semantics. A prototypic realization of this semantics has been implePermission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. iiWAS 2009 Kuala Lumpur Special Issue Copyright 2009 ACM X-XXXXX-XX-X/XX/XX ...$10.00. mented by means of a translation tool generating a distributed WS-BPEL implementation of shared state-based ebBP models. The overall approach is evaluated using a RosettaNet PIP based use case.