E Role-based Decomposition of Business Processes using BPEL

This paper addresses role-based decomposition of a business process model (based on a subset of WS-BPEL, using explicit data links. A mechanism is presented for partitioning a business process so that each partition can be enacted by a different participant. An important goal is to disconnect the partitioning itself from the design of the business process, simplifying the reassignment of activities to different entities. The result is several (compliant) BPEL processes, one for each participant, as well as the information needed to wire them together at deployment time and ensuring correct instance-level connections at runtime. We present details of partitioning and successfully running a sample process with three participants