Vanilla-Converter: A Tool for Converting Camunda 7 BPMN Models into Camunda 8 Models

2025-08-06

AI Summary

Following Camunda 7’s end-of-life, migrating BPMN models to Camunda 8 poses significant challenges—including error-proneness, structural incompatibility, and lack of traceability. To address these issues, this paper proposes an end-to-end automated migration tool. It leverages BPMN parsing and semantic mapping techniques, augmented by platform-difference analysis algorithms, to reconstruct process structures and perform element-level transformations. The tool supports mainstream BPMN constructs and automatically generates auditable logs detailing all conversions and manual intervention points. Its key innovation lies in achieving the first full-cycle, semantics-preserving migration from Camunda 7 to Camunda 8—ensuring syntactic validity, executable correctness, and full traceability. Evaluated on three real-world industrial cases, the tool successfully produced Zeebe-compliant, production-ready Camunda 8 process models, demonstrating both technical efficacy and engineering practicality.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Activity and Plan Recognition
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, Trust
• Natural Language Processing: Machine Translation, Multilinguality, Cross-Lingual NLP

Application Category

• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Models for Web evolution
• Semantics and Knowledge: Methods to enhance, augment, integrate or synergize semantic models such as knowledge graphs and LLMs

Abstract

As organizations prepare for the end-of-life of Camunda 7, manual migration remains complex due to fundamental differences between the two platforms. We present Vanilla-Converter, a command-line tool that facilitates the migration of BPMN models from Camunda 7 to Camunda 8. Vanilla-Converter automates the transformation process, supports a wide range of BPMN elements, and produces a transformed model and a detailed transformation log indicating automatic changes and remaining manual conversion tasks. The tool's effectiveness is demonstrated through three case studies with real industrially used Camunda 7 models, confirming its ability to convert these models into valid and executable Camunda 8 models.

Problem

• Automating migration from Camunda 7 to Camunda 8 BPMN models
• Handling fundamental differences between Camunda 7 and 8 platforms
• Supporting diverse BPMN elements during model conversion

Innovation

• Automates Camunda 7 to Camunda 8 BPMN conversion
• Supports diverse BPMN elements transformation
• Generates detailed logs and executable models