Applying business process re-engineering patterns to optimize WS-BPEL workflows

Abstract

With the advent of XML-based SOA, WS-BPEL shortly turned out to become a widely accepted standard for modeling business processes. Though SOA is said to embrace the principle of business agility, BPEL process definitions are still manually crafted into their final executable version. While SOA has proven to be a giant leap forward in building flexible IT systems, this static BPEL workflow model is somewhat paradoxical to the need for real business agility and should be enhanced to better sustain continual process evolution. In this paper, we point out the potential of adding business intelligence with respect to business process re-engineering patterns to the system to allow for automatic business process optimization. Furthermore, we point out that BPR macro-rules could be implemented leveraging micro-techniques from computer science. We present some practical examples that illustrate the benefit of such adaptive process models and our preliminary findings. © 2009 ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.