Qualitative Analysis of Integration Adapter Modeling

TL;DR

This paper provides a qualitative analysis of integration adapter modeling, defining common capabilities and patterns, and extending previous BPMN-based models to better represent adapter functionalities in message-based systems.

Contribution

It introduces a set of common adapter capabilities and modeling patterns, extending existing BPMN models to improve representation of adapters in integration systems.

Findings

Defined common adapter capabilities and patterns

Extended BPMN models for adapter representation

Evaluated adapter patterns syntactically and semantically

Abstract

Integration Adapters are a fundamental part of an integration system, since they provide (business) applications access to its messaging channel. However, their modeling and configuration remain under-represented. In previous work, the integration control and data flow syntax and semantics have been expressed in the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) as a semantic model for message-based integration, while adapter and the related quality of service modeling were left for further studies. In this work we specify common adapter capabilities and derive general modeling patterns, for which we define a compliant representation in BPMN. The patterns extend previous work by the adapter flow, evaluated syntactically and semantically for common adapter characteristics.