A Novel Framework for Defining and Submitting Workflows to Service-Oriented Systems

Abstract

Service-oriented computing offers efficient solutions for executing complex applications in an acceptable amount of time. These solutions provide important computing and storage resources, but they are too difficult for individual users to handle. In fact, Service-oriented architectures are usually sophisticated in terms of design, specifications, and deployment. On the other hand, workflow management systems provide frameworks that help users to manage cooperative and interdependent processes in a convivial manner. In this paper, we propose a workflow-based approach to fully take advantage of new service-oriented architectures that take the users' skills and the internal complexity of their applications into account. To get to this point, we defined a novel framework named JASMIN, which is responsible for managing service-oriented workflows on distributed systems. JASMIN has two main components: unified modeling language (UML) to specify workflow models and business process execution language (BPEL) to generate and compose Web services. In order to cover both workflow and service concepts, we describe in this paper a refinement of UML activity diagrams and present a set of rules for mapping UML activity diagrams into BPEL specifications. Keywords—Service Composition, Service-Oriented Computing, Service-Oriented Workflow, UML2BPEL, Workflow