On Visualizing and Modelling BPEL with BPMN

The advantages of the process-based approach to implementing applications lead to the development of notations for modelling business processes and languages for enacting them in a process engine for the purpose of process automation. Currently the business process modeling notation (BPMN) is typically used for modelling business processes and the business process execution language (BPEL) is used as the process execution format. Both languages differ in purpose, expressivity and operational semantics. Recently it has been shown that there is no complete bi-directional mapping between BPMN and BPEL and transformations have been defined between the two formalisms. However, these transformations lead to more complex models in both, BPEL and BPMN, and enable a roundtrip for only a limited number of scenarios. In this paper we show how BPEL processes can be modelled using the graphical aspect of BPMN in order to facilitate modelling of executable processes using BPMN while avoiding model transformations.