A Model-Driven Approach for Monitoring ebBP BusinessTransactions

ebXML BPSS (ebBP) is well-suited to specify Business-to-Business (B2B) interactions as choreographies of so-called Business Transactions. Web Services and WS-BPEL as dedicated interface technologies then can be used to provide the implementation of such choreographies. Tracking and ensuring the progress of choreographies calls for monitoring facilities that require gathering information from log data of the runtime systems that execute WS-BPEL processes. However, the information provided by WS-BPEL monitoring tools is fine-granular so that information about the actual progress in terms of choreographies must be extracted manually. Our approach streamlines the monitoring of ebBP Business Transactions leveraging model-driven engineering. First, hierarchical communicating automata are used to formalize Business Transactions. Second, WS-BPEL implementations of these automata are derived such that monitoring events are propagated to a monitoring service whenever a transition of the underlying automaton fires. Third, the monitoring service translates the monitoring events into choreography progress by visually highlighting the active and visited states within the hierarchical automata. It thus presents a user-friendly model that abstracts from the details of the implementing WS-BPEL processes. This makes tracking the current state of choreographies accessible to business users.