Abstract Business Processes

Although the BPEL name suggests that this is a language for specifying executable business processes, BPEL supports both executable business processes and abstract business processes. Abstract business processes specify public message exchange between parties only.

The objective of abstract business processes in BPEL is to specify only the externally observable aspects of process behavior (often also called public process behavior) without the exact details of how the process executes. Abstract processes are not executable. An abstract business process should provide a complete description of external behavior relevant to a partner or several partners it interacts with.

The description of the externally observable behavior of a business process may be related to a single web service or a set of web services. It might also describe the behavior of a participant in a business process. In the later case the abstract processes of all partners must be coupled together...