Title: Query-Based Monitoring of BPEL Business Processes
Anat Eyal, University of Pennsylvania

Abstract
A Business Process consists of a group of business
activities undertaken by one or more organizations in pursuit of
some particular goal. It often interacts with other BPs carried by
the same or other organizations, and the software implementing it is
fairly complex. Standards facilitate the design, deployment, and
execution of BPs. In particular, the recent BPEL standard (Business
Process Execution Language, provides an XML-based
language to describe the interface between the participants in a
process, as well as the full operational logic of the process and
its execution flow. BPEL specifications are automatically compiled
into executable code that implements the described BP and runs on a
BPEL application server.

Monitoring the execution of such processes for interesting patterns
is critical for enforcing business policies and meeting efficiency
and reliability goals.  In general, monitoring
encompasses the tracking of particular patterns in the executions of
individual processes or in the interaction between different
processes, as well as the provision of statistics on the performance
of some  processes or the system. This provides an essential
infrastructure for companies to optimize business processes, reduce
operational costs, and ultimately increase competitiveness.

The goal of this demonstration is to present BPM-QL (Business
process Monitoring), a novel query language and system for
monitoring business processes. BPM-QL allows users to visually
define monitoring tasks and associated reports, using a simple
intuitive interface similar to those used for designing BPEL
processes.  An interesting characteristic of the implementation
is that BPM-QL queries are translated to BPEL processes that run
on the same execution engine as the monitored processes. Our
experiments  indicate that this approach incurs very minimal
overhead, hence is a practical and efficient approach to monitoring.