Research On Constructing Of Software System Supporting Business Process Change

Business process is the core and essence of an enterprise, so it is very important for enterprises. Following with globalized economic, networked information and varied requirement, market and customer requirement are changing quickly. It leads to the business process presenting its varied and dynamic characteristics. Traditional software systems are faced to stable business processes, but nowaday business process has new characteristics, so there are some difficulties in current software systems as following:Firstly, it is very difficultly to separate process logic from application logic, but it is the key to support business process change. Only in this way, when the business process changed, we can adjust the process logic quickly and need not modify the implementation of application logic. However, in current software systems, the process logic is fixed and hidden in application implementations, so we cannot extract independent process logic. Therefore, if the process requirement changed, we have to re-analyze, re-design and re-implement the business software again. This kind of software not only cannot adapt to the quick change market environment, but also increase the enterprise cost.Secondly, it is very difficult to build process traceability between business requirement and system implementation. Only after a clear process association has been built between requirement and implementation, the software system can react to the change of business process requirement quickly and exactly. However, current ways of constructing software system focus on data, function and action, there is no explicit business process modeling from analysis to implementation. So we cannot build business process association between requirement and implementation.Thirdly, current systems are lack of the description of business process change requirement. Current software requirement analysis models only describe the static requirement of business process; they ignore the analysis on business process changing features. Therefore, software systems constructed by this way cannot meet the requirement of business process change.Based on the application background and demands mentioned above, this dissertation makes deep research on some related technologies, and thinks that we should improve the software system architecutre fristly, it is carried out by extracting process relevant semantic from business logic , describing and modeling them as importment elements of the software architecutre. And also, the process independence is keeped from requirement analysis to system design. This is the just way to resolve the problems which business process faced to.The dissertation discussed the software system architecture which supports business process change and the way to construct it. Our goal is providing a technology framework for enterprise to carry out business process management and a series of direct principles of constructing software system based on this framework. This framework and system construct method can achieve business process automatic much better and increase the flexibility, adaptability and expansibility of business system. To achieve this goal, this dissertation researched on some related key technologies. The main researches and innovations of this dissertation are listed below:1. Based on SOA, we propose Business Process-Oriented Software Architecture—BPOSA.BPOSA is a hiberarchy based on service and it extends traditional three-layers architecture by separating business logic from application logic. BPOSA also extracts process logic from business logic and builds an independent business process layer. Furthermore, software entities have explicit process relevant semantic description. BPOSA has the characteristics of separation of business logic and application logic, separation of process logic and business logic.2. We extract implicit process relevant semantic from business logic and give a explicit process logic definition.Besides separating process control logic from business logic and describing it clearly, BPOSA extracts implicit process relevant characteristics hidden in process function parts, and models them as configurable process attributes. The explicit process semantic definition not only makes the users have a clear view of business process which the system supported, but also can react to process dynamic modification quickly by changing the business process definition and reconfiguring these process attributions.3. We propose aπ-calculus-based composition-oriented business process modeling method.The model uses process algebraπ-calculus as its formal basis and builds a complex process by composing simple structured process control modules to reduce the complexity of business process modeling. So it is very suitable to the new characteristics of business process including complexity, variety and distributive.4. We propose a service-based, process-oriented software system construct method.This method focuses on business processes and their changing requirements. In the requirement analysis phase, business service dynamic process preconditions which are relevant to process change can be gotten by analyzing ten types of process change features. In the system design phase, implicit process relevant semantic in service implementation logic is extracted according to the process change requirement of business service. Software system constructed by this way keeps to the BPOSA architecture and it can realize the separation of process logic and application logic.5. The business process change features are extracted and classified. In this dissertation, we propose ten types of business process change features, including execution path change feature, execution order change feature, add and delete a activity, business activity precondition and post-condition change, split and combine activity change feature. Process change feature-oriented system analysis and design is one contribution of this dissertation.6. A configuration-based business process change management service model is proposed.This service model focuses on configuration and it supports importing business process definitions, configuration of process attributions, automatic execution of business process and process change management. If the business process requirement changed, this service can find appropriate business services for every process activities and configure right implementations for these services according to process context.Finally, we practice the business process-oriented software system construct method proposed in this dissertation by a case of Supply Chain Management in a communication equipment sell enterprise. The result shows our method can meet with the requirement of business process change. Through the solution, enterprise management level is promoted, business efficiency is increased and enterprise expense is decreased too. Our work has wide potential application value. Furthermore, we introduceπ-calculus into business process modeling and propose the concept of business process change feature, which is referable for process related researches in other areas.