Collaboration vs. choreography conformance in BPMN

摘要

The BPMN 2.0 standard is a widely used semi-formal notation to modeldistributed information systems from different perspectives. The standard makesavailable a set of diagrams to represent such perspectives. Choreographydiagrams represent global constraints concerning the interactions among systemcomponents without exposing their internal structure. Collaboration diagramsinstead permit to depict the internal behaviour of a component, also referredas process, when integrated with others so to represent a possibleimplementation of the distributed system. This paper proposes a design methodology and a formal framework for checkingconformance of choreographies against collaborations. In particular, the paperpresents a direct formal operational semantics for both BPMN choreography andcollaboration diagrams. Conformance aspects are proposed through two relationsdefined on top of the defined semantics. The approach benefits from theavailability of a tool we have developed, named C4, that permits to experimentthe theoretical framework in practical contexts. The objective here is to makethe exploited formal methods transparent to system designers, thus fostering awider adoption by practitioners.