Research And Implementation On The Integration Of Human Task In Reusable Business Process

Business process is a collection of related, structured activities or tasks that produce a specific service or product for a particular customer or customers. As a special composite service, business process can be encapsulated to reusable components and be integrated to other applications to achieve specific commercial purpose.There are not only web services but also human tasks in a business process, how to naturally and smoothly integrate human tasks into the overall service oriented architecture based systems including modeling, design, implementation and execution has become a key research area. Integrating the human tasks into business process has brought many new challenges for the reusable business component, including how to design the human interaction interface, how to communicate with human, how to keep the consistent relationships between different user interfaces and business logic…etc.There are some disadvantages in the current business process applications. Poor visibility, incomplete human task integration and the lack of access control policy should all be resolved in the further research. It is become a trend to integrate human tasks into business processes and make a flexible description of human task and access control. At the same time the reuse of business process component has become a requirement.There are many technologies for describing business process and how to reuse of it. Like Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), BPEL for Web service (BPEL4WS), Business Process Management (BPM), Component Based Software Engineering (CBSE), Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Service Component Architecture. And the description techniques for human task include BPEL4People, WS-Human Task, and Human Provided Service (HPS). All these techniques have their advantages and disadvantages; they all play important roles for business process reuse and human task integration.Based on Business Process Execution Language and service oriented component architecture, this paper will provide a method that is compatible with existing software standards and with scalability and flexibility for human task integration. It will encapsulate different human tasks with different portlets. And at the same time the encapsulated business process can be reused directly by other applications, therefor achieve the purpose of reuse of business process. Finally the paper will present a bank loan review example to exemplify the procedure of human task integration and business process reuse.