Portability benchmark of X-PDL files among WFMSs from different vendors

The evolution of workflow as a technology has covered a number of different product areas which in turn has raised the need for standardization. In order to support the use of workflow and develop interoperability and portability standards, the Workflow Management Coalition was established. The WfMC created the reference model to deal with the standardization. This thesis focuses in the usability of the Interface 1 of the reference model. The interface provides an interchange format the XML Process Definition Language that can support the exchange of the process definitions among different workflow vendors. During the thesis there were made some tests in order to evaluate whether this standard truly ensures business process model portability among different vendors as well as different XPDL dialects. As a first step a business process model named “Purchase Request” was designed, which served as a reference example throughout the whole project. This model was tested on top of a several commercial and open-source workflow management products previously selected. Assessments that were made, specifically included these aspects: Design portability that is whether the same model can be developed in approximately the same way in all the tools, Execution portability- if the reference example is properly imported and Translatability- in cases when the model was not properly imported what are the most common portability problems and how we can manage them. As a result, the tests concluded that although only a single standard was used, a process model with the same content can be interpreted in different ways and so these custom behaviors cannot be easily understood by all parties. As a future work we suggested the adoption of a cross compiler which would be able to automatically translate the source XPDL into a target tool-specific format XPDL.