ePVM - An embeddable process virtual machine

At the heart of every business process management system resides a workflow engine, here termed process execution engine. Yet despite playing such a central role, contemporary business process engines generally still leave much to be desired in terms of interoperability, versatility, and programmability. Therefore, this paper introduces ePVM, an embeddable process execution engine aimed at solving these issues. Basically, ePVM is built upon two core concepts. Firstly, an execution model which is deeply rooted in the theoretical framework of communicating state machines. Secondly, whereas many efforts have been made to create the ultimate process language, ePVM provides in contrast a low-level run-time environment based on a JavaScript interpreter where higher-level domain specific process definition languages can be mapped to. Our work explores both concepts in more detail and also positions ePVM in the current business process and workflow domain. © 2007 IEEE.