SMART: Modeling and monitoring support for business process coordination in dynamic environments

Abstract

In several relevant applicative domains, handling a high-level business process requires coordinating a variety of fragmented software systems, and coping with complex dynamics that crucially depend on non-controllable events and actions, also coming from external services. In these cases, the effective management of the process stands on the ability to continuously identify, aggregate, and correlate the relevant events from a variety of independent sources, and to timely enact coordination actions. This is a significant challenge for the existing modeling and monitoring solutions. In this paper, we discuss SMART, a solution designed to support operative business process management under these premises. SMART offers a flexible and agile modeling approach, where external services, information sources and proprietary support systems systems can be meaningfully and smoothly integrated according to business logics, to result into "operative consoles" which can be used as effective coordination tools. We demonstrate the key features and advantages of SMART through a sample application to support conference organization. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.