“BPELanon”: Anonymizing BPEL Processes Marigianna Skouradaki 1 , Dieter Roller 1 , Cesare Pautasso 2 , and Frank Leymann 1 1 Institute of Architecture of Application Systems, University of Stuttgart, Germany {skouradaki,dieter.h.roller,leymann}@iaas.uni-stuttgart.de 2 Faculty of Informatics, University of Lugano, Switzerland c.pautasso@ieee.org Abstract We are currently developing a performance benchmark for Workflow Management System. As a first activity we are collecting real-world processes. However, to protect their competitive advantage, some companies are not willing to share their corporate assets. This work’s objective is to propose a method (“BPELanon”) for BPEL process anonymization in order to deal with the problem. The method trans- forms a process to preserve its original structure and runtime behavior, while completely anonymizing its business semantics. Anonymization is a complicated task that must meet the requirements we outline in this paper. Namely, we need to preserve the structural and executional information while anonymizing information such as namespaces, names (activity names, variable names, partner link names etc.), and XPath expressions that may reveal proprietary information. Furthermore, the names contained in the anonymized process should be chosen carefully in order to avoid conflicts, preserve privacy, and file-readability. Multi- ple dependency relations among process artifacts raise the challenge of fulfilling the aforementioned requirements, as a unique change in a file potentially leads to a flow of changes to other related process artifacts. Keywords: Anonymization, BPEL, Workflows, Business Processes 1 Introduction Given the fact that “process equals product” [3] most companies and business organizations are not willing to share their process models with academic re- searchers due to competitive reasons to protect their intellectual property. Since our first goal with the “BenchFlow” project 1 is to collect real-world business process models that can be later used to synthesize a Benchmark, we want to encourage sharing of models that are suitable for our purposes without revealing critical company information. The contributions of this work are as follows: 1. identify the requirements of anonymization methodology 2. propose a method (“BPELanon”) that exports the anonymized process model containing the original BPEL process without its business semantics, but solely its executable structure 1 http://www.iaas.uni-stuttgart.de/forschung/projects/benchflowE.php N. Herzberg, M. Kunze (eds.): Proceedings of the 6th Central European Workshop on Services and their Composition (ZEUS 2014), Potsdam, Germany, 27-03-2014, published at http://ceur-ws.org