Application of business-driven decision making to RESTful business processes

Abstract

Runtime adaptability is a desired quality attribute in business processes, particularly cross-organizational ones. Past work showed that designing and implementing business processes following the REpresentational State Transfer (REST) principles increases runtime adaptability. However, the past solutions for RESTful business processes (RESTfulBP) were limited to manual selection of process fragments to be composed at runtime. Therefore, we have now integrated into the RESTfulBP system an extended version of our MiniZnMASC middleware to enable concurrent selection of different RESTfulBP process fragments for different classes of user at runtime. This selection maximizes overall business value, while satisfying all given constraints. We also extended the RESTfulBP runtime engine with a process fragment processor, a constraint processor, a process fragment repository, and several types of monitoring resources. Experiments with prototype implementations showed that our solutions are feasible, functionally correct, business beneficial, with relatively low performance overhead, and with satisfactory scalability. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012.