Rule Based Business Process Execution with BPEL

While WS-BPEL addresses the industry’s need for rich and standard service orchestration semantics it provide only limited expressiveness to describe (business) decision logic and conditional reaction logic. In this paper we propose a heterogenous service-oriented integration of rules into BPEL to describe rule-based business processes and implement a distributed rule inference service middleware using rule engines which are deployed as distributed web-based inference services on an ESB. This declarative rule-based Semantic BPM (SBPM) approach aims at agile and adaptive business process execution via rules.