BPEL Fragments for Modularized Reuse in Modeling BPEL Processes

BPEL has been established as the standard for modeling business processes by orchestrating Web services. When modeling a BPEL process, users end up in basically three approaches: from scratch, by using a process template or a reference process, and by ad hoc modifying a existing process model to meet the current requirements. There is strong demand on a flexible and modularized approach for reusing BPEL process models. As neither the BPEL standard nor the current BPEL extensions support such a feature for reuse, we present in this paper a formal definition for BPEL fragments. In this paper we first study the related work on process fragments and distinguish BPEL fragments from existing reuse approaches in service-oriented process modeling. Based on the requirement analysis we present a definition of BPEL fragments in XML schema. By adopting our definition of BPEL fragments, the flexibility of modularized reuse of BPEL process models can be significantly increased.