Static-dynamic integration of external services into generic business processes

Abstract

Organizations usually handle their business cases by requesting external services that are integrated with internal procedures to a composite business process. External services may be atomic activities or, more often, arbitrarily complex processes. In the simplest case, all business cases of a particular kind follow the same external services and internal procedures. Then, a composite service can be statically predefined without regarding peculiarities and requirements of single business cases. Such compositions ensure that processing business cases follows exact specifications. Yet in a highly dynamic environment, the actual processing may involve different services for each business case depending on its properties, such that appropriate services must be selected during runtime. In this paper, the requirements of static and dynamic environments are naturally combined: Those parts of processing that are known in advance form the "frame" of processing. This frame comprises services that must be used in any case and comprises semantic rules that specify which requirements must be fulfilled by the services that are selected dynamically during processing. Correctness criteria define how static and dynamic composition can be appropriately integrated. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2004.