Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Today business registries are regarded as means of finding services offered by a business partner. However, business registries may also serve as means of searching inter-organizational business process definitions that are relevant in one’s own business environment. Thus, it is important to define in which environments an inter-organizational business process definition is valid. Furthermore, environment-specific adaptations of the business process definition may be registered. In this paper the business process definitions are based on UMM business collaboration models. We discuss two approaches: Firstly, the binding of a model to business environments is specified within the model itself. Secondly, the binding of a model to business environments is defined in the registry meta-data.

Service processes are an important kind of cross-enterprise business processes. However, they show particular properties which require new approaches of design and modeling. Therefore, in this paper a method for designing and modeling service processes is developed. It is component-oriented and uses so-called perspective elements as granularity of the components. The service processes created by the method are both aligned to the customer requirements and efficient in their operation by the use of standardized components.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a promising approach for developing enterprise applications. While the concept of SOA has been described in research and industry literature, the techniques for determining optimal granularity of services and encapsulating business logic in software are unclear. This paper explores this problem using a case study developed with two contrasting approaches to building enterprise applications that utilise services, where one of the approaches employs coarse-grained services developed based on the principles of Object-Orientation (OO), and another approach is based on embedding business rules and logic into executable BPEL scripts and constructing a system as a set of fine-grained services. The quantitative comparison based on a set of mature software engineering metrics showed that a system developed using the BPEL-based approach has a potentially higher structural complexity, but at the same time lower coupling between software modules compared to an OO approach. It was also shown that some of the existing software metrics are inapplicable to SOA, hence new metrics need to be developed.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a promising approach for developing integrated enterprise applications. Although the architectural aspects of SOA have been investigated in research and industry literature, the actual process of designing and implementing services in SOA is not well understood. The goal of this paper is to identify tasks needed for successful design and implementation of services, and investigate their effect on the project and structural software attributes in the context of SOA. This facilitates the specification of guidelines for decreasing the required development effort and capital cost of the SOA projects, and improving the structural software attributes of service implementations. The tasks are identified in the context of top-down, bottom-up and meet-in-the-middle software development strategies.

Nowadays, workflow research has shifted from fundamentals of workflow modelling and enactment towards improvement of the workflow modelling lifecycle and integration of workflow enactment engines with new enabling technologies for process invocation. These efforts along with the workflow component reusability trend, aim at tackling the issues concerning the dynamic and distributed environment of the e-business domain. Other totally distributed technologies like the intelligent multi Agent Systems proved to face some of the special requirements of conducting business through Internet, but they still present credibility problems concerning the overall control of the processes. We propose a web-based «intermediation hybrid architecture» for integrating services by exploiting and combining the advantages of strict centralized topologies that use workflow engines, with totally distributed systems which use agent technologies.

When a workflow process spans to multiple organizations, subprocess task model is an efficient way of representing remote services of other systems. The subprocess task usually represents a single service in conventional workflows. However, if a subprocess task comprises multiple services, and the number of services and the execution flow of the services cannot be decided until run-time, conventional ways of workflow design is not proper to handle such situations efficiently. All potentially reachable paths should be known at process build time in conventional workflow design. However, such an assumption does not always hold in real situations. In this paper, we propose a multi-subprocess task based framework for dynamic workflow interoperations. In the framework, we develop the multi-subprocess task model to handle a subprocess composed of multiple services that are unknown at process build time. In this paper, we also define and implement four components to support the dynamic workflow interoperation: Workflow engine, Adapter, Service Interface Repositories (SIRs), and XML messages. Adapter and SIR make a local WfMS transparent to the location and platform of the interoperating WfMSs by encapsulating external subprocesses and superprocesses. When an example scenario is implemented and evaluated in the proposed framework, the advantages of the framework are obvious in terms of automaticity, adaptability, and efficiency.

As large companies are building up their enterprise architecture solutions, they need to relate business process descriptions to lengthy and formally structured documents of corporate policies and standards. However, these documents are usually not specific to particular tasks or processes, and the user is left to read through a substantial amount of irrelevant text to find the few fragments that are relevant to him. In this paper, we describe a text mining approach to establishing links between business process model elements and relevant parts of governing documents in Statoil, one of Norway’s largest companies. The approach builds on standard IR techniques, gives us a ranked list of text fragments for each business process activity, and can easily be integrated with Statoil’s enterprise architecture solution. With these ranked lists at hand, users can easily find the most relevant sections to read before carrying out their activities.

Currently we have been developing a process-driven e-business service integration (BSI) system through functional extensions of the ebXML technology. And it is targeting on the process-driven e-business service integration markets, such as e-Logistics, e-SCM, e-Procurement, and e-Government, that require process-driven multi-party collaborations of a set of independent organizations. The system consists of three major components – , and . This paper particularly focuses on the choreography modeler that provides the modeling functionality for ebXML-based choreography and orchestration among engaged organizations in a process-driven multiparty collaboration. Now, it is fully operable on an EJB-based framework environment (J2EE, JBOSS, and Weblogic), and also it is applied to e-Logistics process automation and B2B choreography models of a postal service company. This paper mainly describes the implementation details of the modeler, especially focusing on modeling features of the process-driven multi-party collaboration functionality.

The management of collaborative business processes refers to the design, analysis, and execution of interrelated production, logistics and information processes, which are usually performed by different independent enterprises in order to produce and to deliver a specified range of goods or services. The effort to interconnect independently developed business process models and to map them to process-implementing software components is particularly high. The implementation of such collaborative inter-organizational business process models is assisted by so-called choreography languages that can be executed by software applications. In this paper, we present a Petri net based approach for process-model driven deduction of BPEL code. Our approach is based on a specific type of high-level Petri nets, so-called XML nets. We use XML nets both for modeling and coordinating business processes implemented as Web services and for deriving BPEL elements of the Web service based components. Our approach provides a seamless concept for modeling, analysis and execution of business processes.

The Web Service Choreography Description Language (WS-CDL) is a specification for describing multi party collaboration based on Web Services from a global point of view. WS-CDL is designed to be used in conjunction with the Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL or BPEL). Up to now, work on conceptual mappings between both languages is missing. This paper closes this gap by showing how BPEL process definitions of parties involved in a choreography can be derived from the global WS-CDL model. We have implemented a prototype of the mappings as a proof of concept. The automatic transformation leverages the quality of software components interacting in the choreography as advocated in the Model Driven Architecture concept.