Business Process Management. A Bird's-Eye View and Research Agenda (original) (raw)
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Business Process Management: Where Business Processes and Web Services Meet
Business Process Management (BPM) includes methods, techniques, and tools to support the design, enactment, management, and analysis of operational business processes. This special issue presents papers, which contribute to the state of the art of BPM, and should be considered as a spin-off of the successful 2005 edition of International Conference on Business Process Management. In this guest editorial we introduce the four papers in this special issue and comment on recent developments in the broader BPM domain.
Analysis of business process integration in Web service context
Future Generation Computer Systems, 2007
The integration of Web services is a recent outgrowth of the Business Process integration field that will require powerful meta-schema matching mechanisms supported by higher level abstractions, such as UML meta-models. Currently, there are many XML-based workflow process specification languages (e.g. XPDL, BPEL) which can be used to define business processes in the Web services and Grid Computing world. However, with limited capability to describe the relationships (schemas or ontologies) between process objects, the dominant use of XML as a meta-data markup language makes the semantics of the processes ambiguous. OWL-S (Ontology Web Language for Services) exploits the semantic description power of OWL to build an ontology language for services. It therefore becomes a candidate for an inter lingua. In this paper, we propose an integration framework for business processes, which is applied to Web services defined in OWL-S.
Integration of business process modeling and Web services: a survey
Service Oriented Computing and Applications, 2014
A significant challenge in business process automation involves bridging the gap between business process representations and Web service technologies that implement business activities. We are interested in business process representations such as BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) and EPCs (Event-Driven Process Chains). Web Service technologies include protocols such as SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), architectures such as RESTful (REpresentational State Transfer) or semantic description languages and formalisms such as OWL-S (Web Ontology Language for Services) and WSMO (Web Service Modeling Ontology). This paper reviews previous work on the integration of business process representations and Web service technologies. It provides a perspective on the field by summarizing, organizing, and classifying the proposed approaches. Consequently, this study has identified opportunities for future research in the field, including the need for a generic transformation approach among arbitrary models, the need to represent mappings in a formalized way, and the necessity of a common execution framework.
Lectures on Concurrency and Petri Nets, 2004
Over the last decade there has been a shift from "data-aware" information systems to "process-aware" information systems. To support business processes an enterprise information system needs to be aware of these processes and their organizational context. Business Process Management (BPM) includes methods, techniques, and tools to support the design, enactment, management, and analysis of such operational business processes. BPM can be considered as an extension of classical Workflow Management (WFM) systems and approaches. This tutorial introduces models, systems, and standards for the design, analysis, and enactment of workflow processes. Petri nets are used for the modeling and analysis of workflows. Using Petri nets as a formal basis, contemporary systems, languages, and standards for BPM and WFM are discussed. Although it is clear that Petri nets can serve as a solid foundation for BPM/WFM technology, in reality systems, languages, and standards are developed in an ad-hoc fashion. To illustrate this XPDL, the "Lingua Franca" proposed by the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC), is analyzed using a set of 20 basic workflow patterns. This analysis exposes some of the typical semantic problems restricting the application of BPM/WFM technology.
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Service Oriented Business Process Modeling Today and Tomorrow
Research and Development in E-Business through Service-Oriented Solutions
In this chapter, the authors explore fundamental links between business process management and Web services. The authors discuss how service technologies can extend traditional business process management into a cross-organizational environment (i.e., over Internet) to face the fast changing world. Particularly, the authors discuss the issues of business process modeling for service-oriented business process management.
Business processes for Web Services: Principles and applications
IBM Systems Journal, 2000
The Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS or BPEL for short) is an XML-based language for defining business processes that provides an interoperable, portable language for both abstract and executable processes and that was designed from the beginning to operate in the heterogeneity and dynamism that is commonplace in information technology today. BPEL builds on the layers of flexibility provided by the Web Services stack, and especially by XML. In this paper, we provide a brief introduction to BPEL with emphasis on architectural drivers and basic concepts. Then we survey ongoing BPEL work in several application areas: adding quality of service to BPEL, extending BPEL to activities involving humans, BPEL for grid computing, and BPEL for autonomic computing. Ó
2016
Nowadays companies and organizations are challenged to integrate and automate their business processes. A business process is a set of logically related tasks, carried out to produce a product or service. Business processes are typically implemented using Web services. Web services are programmable interfaces that can be invoked through standard communication protocols. In general, the need to outsource parts of a business processes results in a large number of Web services, which are, generally, heterogeneous and distributed among various organizations and platforms. The ability to select and integrate these Web services at runtime is desirable as it would enable Web services platforms a quick reaction to changing business needs and failures, reducing implementation costs and minimizing losses by poor availability. The goal of dynamic and automatic Web services composition is to generate a composition plan (workflow) at runtime that meets certain business goal. Semantics based tech...