On event Driven BPEL

WS-BPEL has become a leading standard in the area of business process management, and since event processing is typically part of a bigger picture, it often interacts with business process management systems. One of the success factors is to make the environment ready for event processing, i.e. being able to get the right events, and being able to perform the right actions, while the event processing network has detected a situation (in one of the next postings I'll discuss how situation is related to the EPN world).

My student, Alex Kofman, has been doing recently a M.Sc. thesis looking from the BPEL perspective, he has determined what need to be done in order to extend BPEL to be "event driven", and proposed detailed modifications to the standard. This is intended to enable easy interaction between event processing system and BPM systems that plays as producer and consumer from the event processing viewpoint, while from the BPM viewpoint, input events can serve in decisions about orchestration, while output events can provide decisions external to the BPM based on the BPM state.

Here are some of the main points raised in this thesis:

1. Ability of BPM subscribe/unsubscribe to events.
2. Ability of BPM to publish events.
3. Ability to invalidate one or more processes as a result of an event (partially exists).
4. Ability to start a new process as a result of an event (partially exists)
5. Ability to invoke a task upon occurrence of an event
6. Adapt process execution upon occurrence of an event
7. Support the definition of an event processing pattern requested by the BPM engine, as a "callback" to an event processing system.
This in general will raise the level of abstraction and make the integration easier...

More about this project, later -- the thesis is now being written, Alex gave presentation about it last week in the department seminar, so this is a good time to start communicating these ideas.