Restful Information Resource Pool Framework Towards Flexible Business Process Implementation

Business Process Management (BPM) decouples enterprise application withbusiness logic. However, there are some disadvantages of implementation at the sideof flexible process. With the growth of enterprises business processes‘quantity andcomplexity, hard-coding is inefficient and difficult to maintain. How to provide a wayto implement transformation from business models to enterprise process componentsand flexible business process has become a big issue.Composition of BPM engine and web service is a common enterprise processmiddleware solution. However, process engine whose implementation based on Token‘is easy to be bottleneck of information system. SOAP service is difficult toimplement and maintain for it is a heavy-weight service component. SMEs needlight-weight enterprise process middleware solutions.To solve this problem, RIRP (RESTful Information Resource Pool) is proposed.RIRP is resource-centric and based on the idea of resource representational statetransfer. RIRP focuses on the transformation between process model and RESTfulresources, provides a resource meta-model, and constructs mapping relations betweenbusiness models and resources. Moreover, on the basis of resource meta-model, RIRPruns process by the interaction of resource status transfer and rule engine whichprovides flexible process configuration and management. The main research work is as follows:(1) RESTful information resource pool frameworkThe framework can be divided into three layers. Request and response layer isused to analyze http request and generate http response. Resource layer implementsthe transformation between business models and resources, provides flexible process.Data layer encapsulates the database operations and transaction management.(2) Transformation method from standard process model to enterprisesinformation resourcesResearch the modeling approach of process model and resources. Connectbusiness model with resource model by resource statuses and status transfer.Construct mapping relations between process model and resource model.(3) Flexible business processResearch the approach of flexible process: Scalability of process entity resource;Dynamic change of process changing; Dynamic composition and decomposition ofprocess.(4) Resource pool runtime support and dynamic resource managementResearch the implementation of resource monitoring and management; provide away of resource full lifecycle management based on resource status; research theapproach of security and performance optimizing.(5) Prototype System of RESTful information resource poolConstruct the RESTful information resource pool. Take a cargo company thatuses resource pool as an example which shows the effectiveness of this framework.The implementation of the prototype and verification results shows that theframework provides an effective and stable solution for business process middleware.And the research work of the paper has some reference value and applicationprospect.