Realising Dead Path Elimination in BPMN

Abstract

The Web Service Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) lacks any standard graphical notation. Various efforts have been undertaken to visualize BPEL using the Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN). Although this is straightforward for the majority of concepts, it is tricky for the full BPEL standard, partly due to the insufficiently specified BPMN execution semantics. The upcoming BPMN~2.0 revision will provide this clear semantics. In this paper, we show how the dead path elimination (DPE) capabilities of BPEL can be expressed with this new semantics and discuss the limitations. We provide a generic formal definition of DPE and discuss resulting control flow requirements independent of specific process description languages.