Configuration And Management Of Business Process

In the cloud computing, a new application mode of software, Software as a Service (SaaS) aims at meeting different user’s individual business requirements and offering flexible variety of customized services. Since the new mode could customize business process for many users according to the individual requirement, business process management is an important technique to realize the mode of SaaS. If business process management adopts manual configurations, the configurations are easy to make mistakes and reduce efficiency. In order to ensure correctness and efficiency in business process configurations, automatic configuration methods have an important research field. However, existing work fulfills automatic configuration mainly by restricting or hiding some activities of business process. This article presents a new method of automatic configuration which automatically separates a configurable business process into atomic sub-process, and then the atomic sub-process are assembled into the required business process. The detailed contents are as follows:(1)Focusing on business process configuration, we adopt a formal model called a dependent structure which models business process. Unlike other formal models (e.g. Petri nets, process algebras and automata). It can directly specify the dependency relations between business processes through regarding events with data information as basic elements and combining data with controlling. It will benefit to compute all configurations for a business process.(2) Centering on the definition of process rules, BPEL adjusts and orchestrates a series of stateless service so as to combine a complex business process. This article summaries the rules of translating BPEL into dependency structure models, in terms of the properties of BPEL and realize the translation process.(3) This article proposes a new configuration method which can automatically determine variants of business process, aiming at the requirements of specific users. This method avoids independent activities and improves configuration efficiency. In addition, it theoretically proves the correctness of the configuration method.(4) We develop a prototyping tool which realizes both the transformation from business processes described by BPEL to dependency structures and the separation/combination of the configurable business processes. Besides, we demonstrate the configuration method using a case.