Formalizing Application Integration Patterns

Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIPs) and their extensions denote the informally described building blocks of current Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) systems. Although a recent approach strives to provide an EIP formalization based on Coloured Petri Nets (CPNs), it does not completely consider EAI requirements, such as complex data, transacted resources and time. In the absence of a comprehensive formal definition, the patterns cannot be verified, and thus a formal foundation of EAI is missing. In this work, we leverage the novel db-net approach that finds a better balance between the data and process-related aspects than CPNs and we extend it according to the EAI requirements that we systematically collect on a pattern level. Then we discuss pattern realizations, and evaluate our approach for comprehensiveness, test correctness, and show its applicability.