A generic BPMS user portal for business processes execution interoperability

Abstract

Business Process Management System (BPMS) integrates several software modules to support the business process (BP) lifecycle. A process modeler, process engine, a web portal for interaction with users, and a REST/SOAP API which exposes operations from the engine are key ones. In previous works we have evaluated several BPMS identifying similarities in terms of the concepts they manage in their user portals and the APIs they expose, and how the user portals became highly coupled to the underlying process engine through the provided API. We proposed a generic user portal that makes invocations to a generic API decoupling the portal from the specific process engine it invokes, which can be exchanged through the generic API invocation to different process engines. In this paper we present an extension of this work by adding concepts to the generic API and data model, a comparative analysis between BPMS, as well as the implementation of adapters for three different engines to show its capabilities.