Enabling the Extraction and Insertion of Reusable Choreography Fragments

Reuse of service orchestrations or service compositions is extensively studied in the literature of process modeling. Sub-processes, process templates, process variants, and process reference models are employed as reusable elements for these purposes. The concept of process fragments has been previously introduced in order to capture parts of a process model and store them for later reuse. However, similar efforts on facilitating the reuse of processes that cross the boundaries of organizations expressed as service choreographies are not available yet. In this paper, we introduce the concept of choreography fragments as reusable elements for service choreography modeling. Choreography fragments can be extracted from choreography models, adapted, stored, and later inserted into new models. Based on a formal model for choreography fragments, we define methods and algorithms for the extraction and insertion of fragments from and into service choreographies. We then discuss an experimental and proof-of-concept evaluation of our proposal.