Levi – the native bpmn 2.0 execution engine

Abstract

In today's enterprise world, as more and more importance is placed on process automation and IT based governance, organizations tend to model and manage their business processes to achieve increased efficiency and productivity. The proper use of process modeling concepts in business scenarios enables designers to specify process requirements in terms of interactions enacted by human agents. Although Business Process Modeling is possible with languages like Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), they use more of a programing oriented view as oppose to human oriented view. Standardization of the Business Process Model and Notation version 2.0 (BPMN 2.0) provide a way to support inter-operation of business processes at human user level, rather than at the software engine. Although BPMN has being standardized, its wide adoption is limited by the lack of runtimes supporting BPMN. Although there are several BPMN implementations, they convert the BPMN to BPEL or another intermediate representation, which will yield mix results. In this paper, we discuss the design of Levi, a BPMN 2.0 runtime build using the underline constructs of ODE (Orchestration Director Engine), Apache based open source process engine. Unlike most other approaches, Levi supports BPMN natively using a concurrent runtime that supports Join pattern.