Service-based processes

IEEE Software, 2000

BILITY have caused a signifi cant shift in business processes, from static solutions to fl exible processes that can address rapidly changing business needs. Consider virtual supply chains, where business partners change seamlessly as new business opportunities arise. The marketplace needs business processes that it can break into independent elements and then recompose on demand. Dynamic, fl exible business models require supporting information systems that evolve as quickly as the businesses they support. Most of the changes can't be applied during conventional maintenance but must be performed transparently on running systems.

2005

Abstract In most organizations, business process realizations must be aligned with existing systems, which can impose specific requirements. Currently, however, there is no way to track the alignment between business processes and corresponding technical implementations. The authors' proposed framework offers a systematic way to classify and assess technical realizations of business processes.

2011 30th International Conference of the Chilean Computer Science Society, 2011

Reducing the gap between the definition, modeling and management of business definition, modeling and management of business processes and the realization of the main processes functions through software services requires a methodological approach. Addressing such gap, this paper focuses on the interactions between the activities of a business process and the functionality provided by software services. It presents a meta-model to formally specify such interactions. The proposed meta-model is instantiated through a case study. Lessons learnt through the development of an example were used to define a graphic editor prototype, as an automated tool for managing interactions between business processes and software services. The proposed approach enables the alternative application of top-down and bottom-up analysis techniques for modeling processes and services, and assists developers with an integrated tool for modeling business processes and software services in a seamlessly combined way.

Uncovering Essential Software Artifacts through Business Process Archeology

Reverse engineering techniques have become very important within the maintenance process providing several benefits. They retrieve abstract representations that not only facilitate the comprehension of legacy systems but also refactor these representations. Business process archaeology has emerged as a set of techniques and tools to recover business processes from source code and to preserve the existing business functions and rules buried in legacy source code. This chapter presents a reverse engineering process and a tool to retrieve services from running databases. These services are further reused in composing business processes with respect to Service-Oriented Architecture, a new architectural style that promotes agility.

Proceedings of the Fifth International Symposium on Business Modeling and Software Design, 2015

Enterprise necessitates to follow the rapid evolution of its business processes and rapidly adapt the existing software systems to its arising needs. A preliminary requirement is that the software subsystems are available and interoperable. A widely diffused solution is moving the adopted software solutions toward an evolving architecture, such as the one based on services. The objective of the research presented in this paper is to support the reuse of the existing software systems in a Service Oriented Architecture. The proposed solution is based on the idea that a Service Oriented Architecture can be obtained from a wide range of existing pieces of software. Such code components can be extracted from the existing software systems by identifying those ones supporting the business activities. Then, the paper proposes an approach for identifying the parts of software candidate to support a business process activity and it is based on the recovering of the links existing between the model of a business process and the supporting software systems. .

2004

Service-oriented architectures and Web service infrastructure provide the ideal framework for interconnecting organizations and for defining distributed business applications. The possibility to exploit business process definition and execution languages is particularly relevant for capturing the process-oriented nature of these applications. However, business processes by themselves are not enough to manage the changes and to allow an organization to continuously adapt its business model to the typical needs of distributed applications. To achieve this flexibility, it is of uttermost importance to link the business processes to the organizational strategy and to the business goals that motivate the need of these processes.

By the use of Web Service technologies and the Internet it is possible to lay the foundation for virtual value chains that cross enterprise boundaries. As the number of services and their interaction grow, it is evident that the flow of message exchange between services needs to be coordinated in a structured way. Executable process languages such as BPEL are proposed as an instrument for the coordination of services. Executable processes must be designed such that they solve technical coordination problems as well as provide a fundament for organizations to manage and monitor the progress of the business. In this paper we examine how the design of executable processes is affected by both technical and business issues. Furthermore, we examine a set of architectures that enable the use of executable processes to cater to both business and technical needs. We provide fundamental guidelines on how to apply the architectures.

2008

As a service composition language, BPEL imposes as constraint that a business process model should consist only of activities for interacting with other business processes. BPEL provides limited support for implementing internal activities, i.e. activities that are performed by a single business process without involvement of other business processes. BPEL is hence not suitable to implement internal activities that include complex data manipulation. There are a number of options to make BPEL able to implement such internal activities. In this paper we analyse those options based on their feasibility, efficiency, reusability, portability and merging. The analysis indicates that delegating internal activities' functionality to other services is the best option. We therefore present an approach for transforming internal activities to service invocations. The application of this approach on a business process model results in a service composition model that consists only of activities for interaction. * This work is part of the Freeband A-MUSE project (http://a-muse.freeband.nl) sponsored by the Dutch government under contract BSIK 03025.

Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, 2008

We propose here that enterprise business processes need to be mapped to information systems. Therefore, an information system deliverable is an integration of Enterprise information, Enterprise business rules, and Enterprise processes. Since the process model is built on top of business rules, we propose a uniform representation system that shall explicitly bring out process logic as well as rule logic. As a result, we shall obtain a hierarchy that shall allow smooth movement between process and rule logic. Conceptually, this implies that we shall treat rules as atomic processes. We instantiate the generic method model with concepts of the IS deliverable and thereby represent rule and process logic as dependency graphs. We exemplify our representation with the ATM bank example and show a verification step to ensure that enterprise process needs are indeed met.

2011

In recent years organisations have been seeking technological solutions for enacting their business process models using ad hoc and heuristic approaches. However, limited results have been obtained due to the expansion of business processes across geographical boundaries and the absence of structured methods, frameworks and/or Information Technology (IT) infrastructures to enact these processes. In an attempt to enact business process models using distributed technologies, we introduce a novel architectural framework to bridge the gap between Business Process Models and Grid-aware Service Oriented Architectures (GSOA). BPMSOA framework is aligned with the Model Driven Engineering (MDE) approach and is instantiated for role-based business process models, (in particular Role Activity Diagramming (RAD)) using mobile process languages such as pi-ADL. The evaluation of the BPMSOA framework using the Submission process from the digital libraries domain has revealed that role-based business process models can be successfully enacted in GSOA environments with certain limitations.