Abstract:
The growth rate for EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) is one of the highest among IT applications. EAI applications are based on business processes, directing the flow of events. Proprietary standards are used for the specification of those processes. During the last years much effort has been put into the development of independent XML based standards. BPML (Business Process Modelling Language) and XPDL (XML Process Definition Language) are two representations of that kind. Business process modelling tools are able to export defined processes into one of the mentioned grammars. EAI applications and business process modelling tools don’t inevitably support the same standards. In order to avoid a redefinition of exisiting process definitions within another standard, it proves to be reasonable to transform these definitions.
This thesis is concerned with the question of how a transformation of XPDL into BPML and BPML into XPDL can be realised. Based on a comparison of element concepts, two algorithms, enabling a transformation, were defined. Subsequently it is explained a way of how to implement a converter application. An architectural description serves as basis therefore. As part of the implementation a test process was defined within both grammars. The algorithms were applied on both process definitions and the result of the transformation was compared with the manually defined processes.
The thesis ends with recommendations for extending both the converter architecture as well as the defined algorithms.
