Communication Abstractions for Distributed Business Processes

Abstract. Languages for business process definition generally suffer from myopic approaches to capturing communication between distributed processes. Effective communication between processes requires: support for conversations involving interrelated interactions spread over time; ability to select and group messages based on their content, regardless of format and transport technology; and resolving contention between processes or tasks for common sets of messages. This paper presents a set of communication abstractions that provide a “glue ” between the process layer and the middleware. The paper also reports on an implementation of these abstractions and an experimental evaluation