Interacting Business Processes based on Data-Driven Service Composition

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Mathias Weske
• Co-Applicants: Professor Dr.-Ing. Avigdor Gal, Ph.D.; Dr. Malik Yousef
• Subject Area: Security and Dependability, Operating-, Communication- and Distributed Systems
• Term: from 2011 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 195243984

• Final Report Year: 2019

Final Report Abstract

Business process management is an important discipline in organizing activities in a business setting. Standardized process modeling languages are introduced by industry consortium to capture these activities and their order into process models that serve the communication, improvement, and automation of organizational business processes. While activities are treated as first class citizens in process models the data perspective is overlooked. The data that is utilized by the process activities is particularly important for their automation. In this project, we investigated the role of data in business process automation. In particular, we focused on the data that is exchanged between activities that belong to different business participants and how certain activities can be automatically executed by invoking web services. At first, we investigated the role that events (real world happenings) have in determining the state of the business process interactions or differently know as business process choreographies. To this end, we proposed a method for connecting activity-relevant events to event sources. In addition, data changes are taken into account to increase the accuracy of the method for deriving in real-time the state of a business process choreography. As for the data that is exchanged between business processes, the participants need to have a common understanding, as well as integrate the incoming data with their local systems. For this purpose, we developed a model-driven approach that automates the data exchange between the business processes. We propose a global data model as an agreement between participants on the shared data. This is realized through individually matching the global data model to each participant's local data model. If the integration cannot be realized in an automatic fashion, we propose integration effort as a non-functional metric that assess the amount of efforts a human programmer requires to integrate the services manually. Due to REST being a prevailing architectural style for developing Web services, we designed methods that implement business process choreographies as RESTful interactions on the Web. These methods preserve a clear separation of concerns between business process modelers and web developers while ensuring a proper execution of business process choreographies. As conclusion, our research contribution includes a set of artifacts and methods that facilitate the automatic execution of data-aware business process choreographies.

Publications

• Improving Business Process Intelligence with Object State Transition Events. International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, 2013
  Nico Herzberg, Andreas Meyer, Oleh Khovalko, and Mathias Weske
  
• Towards Automating the Detection of Event Sources. ICSOC Workshops 2013
  Nico Herzberg, Oleh Khovalko, Anne Baumgrass, Mathias Weske
  
• Automating Data Exchange in Process Choreographies. Information Systems 2014
  Andreas Meyer, Luise Pufahl, Kimon Batoulis, Dirk Fahland, and Mathias Weske
  
• Measuring Expected Integration Effort in Service Composition. IEEE International Conference on Services Computing, 2014
  Tomer Sagi, Avigdor Gal, and Matthias Weidlich
  
• Towards Implementing REST-Enabled Business Process Choreographies. Business Information Systems 2018
  Adriatik Nikaj, Marcin Hewelt, and Mathias Weske
  
• Semi-automatic Derivation of RESTful Choreographies from Business Process Choreographies. Software and System Modeling (SoSyM) 2019
  Adriatik Nikaj, Mathias Weske and Jan Mendling