Abstract
This article reports on the Design Science engineering cycle for implementing a modeling method to support model-driven, process-centric API management. The BPMN standard was hereby enriched on semantic, syntactic and tool levels in order to provide a viable solution for integrating API requests with diagrammatic business process models in order to facilitate the documentation or testing of REST API calls directly in a modeling environment. The method can be implemented by stakeholders that need to map and manage their API ecosystem, thus gaining more API management agility and improving their software engineering productivity. By assimilating API ecosystem conceptualization in the modeling environment, the proposal differs from both RPA (which typically employs non-BPMN process diagramming e.g., in UIPath) and BPM Systems (which typically isolate all API-related semantics outside the process modeling language to keep the diagrammatic representation standard-compliant).
Highlights
This article reports on Design Science work aiming to engineer a modeling method that establishes a functional bridge between the BPMN standard and executable REST APIs
We focused on API ecosystem management that includes services mostly used for retrieving or sending data, while cloud services are mostly used for acquiring superior computing power or storage space
This article reports on a new modeling method for model-driven API management which enriches the BPMN standard by adding new semantic elements, as well as functionality on prototype level
Summary
There is a lack of modeling methods for managing those API ecosystems and for mapping them on business process models that may already exist in an organization’s process repository. The motivation for this project derives from larger work investigating possibilities to bridge the “design-time vs run-time” gap in terms of API management, in a Business Process Management context. The alternative approach proposed in this article is to capture a conceptualization of the API ecosystem in the modeling environment, allowing its diagrammatic configurations before any actual data must be passed to run-time APIs. An agile metamodeling approach based on the Agile Modeling Method Engineering (AMME) [5] methodology is employed to tailor an open source BPMN implementation for the aforementioned purpose.
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