A hybrid approach for business environment-aware management of service-based business processes

Abstract

Enterprises struggle to find a balance between adapting their business processes (BPs) against business environments and keeping competitiveness. Indeed, while the imperative nature of monolithic BPs is too rigid to adapt them at runtime, the declarative one of the purely rulebased BPs is very time-consuming. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on business environment-aware management of service-based business processes (SBPs) aiming at conciliating imperative and declarative techniques. Our challenge is to develop a hybrid management approach that (1) preserves standards to describe SBPs, (2) keeps non-dependency to a specific BP engine and (3) minimizes designers efforts. Based on a semantic modeling, we are able to synthesize a controller, itself modeled as a BP, connected to the BP to be monitored and configured. Using our approach does not impact any existing business process management system since controllers are BPs that can be deployed and enacted along with the managed processes. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.