Business Process Modeling with Services

Author(s):  
Youcef Baghdadi ◽  
Naoufel Kraiem

Reverse engineering techniques have become very important within the maintenance process providing several benefits. They retrieve abstract representations that not only facilitate the comprehension of legacy systems but also refactor these representations. Business process archaeology has emerged as a set of techniques and tools to recover business processes from source code and to preserve the existing business functions and rules buried in legacy source code. This chapter presents a reverse engineering process and a tool to retrieve services from running databases. These services are further reused in composing business processes with respect to Service-Oriented Architecture, a new architectural style that promotes agility.

Author(s):  
Michael Weiss ◽  
Daniel Amyot

This chapter demonstrates how the user requirements notation (URN) can be used to model business processes. URN combines goals and scenarios in order to help capture and reason user requirements prior to detailed design. In terms of application areas, this emerging standard targets reactive systems in general, with a particular focus on telecommunications systems and services. This chapter argues that the URN can also be applied to business process modeling. To this end, it illustrates the notation, its use, and its benefits with a supply chain management case study. It then briefly compares this approach to related modeling approaches, namely, use case-driven design, service-oriented architecture analysis, and conceptual value modeling. The authors believe that a URN-based approach will provide usable and useful tools to assist researchers and practitioners with the modeling, analysis, integration, and evolution of existing and emerging business processes.


2010 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 52-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Masoom Alam ◽  
Mohammad Nauman ◽  
Xinwen Zhang ◽  
Tamleek Ali ◽  
Patrick C. K. Hung ◽  
...  

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an architectural paradigm that enables dynamic composition of heterogeneous, independent, multi-vendor business services. A prerequisite for such inter-organizational workflows is the establishment of trustworthiness, which is mostly achieved through non-technical measures, such as legislation, and/or social consent that businesses or organizations pledge themselves to adhere. A business process can only be trustworthy if the behavior of all services in it is trustworthy. Trusted Computing Group (TCG) has defined an open set of specifications for the establishment of trustworthiness through a hardware root-of-trust. This paper has three objectives: firstly, the behavior of individual services in a business process is formally specified. Secondly, to overcome the inherent weaknesses of trust management through software alone, a hardware root of-trust devised by the TCG, is used for the measurement of the behavior of individual services in a business process. Finally, a verification mechanism is detailed through which the trustworthiness of a business process can be verified.


Author(s):  
Steve McRobb ◽  
Richard Millham ◽  
Jianjun Pu ◽  
Hongji Yang

This chapter presents a report of an experimental approach that uses WSL as an intermediate language for the visualisation of COBOL legacy systems in UML. Key UML techniques are identified that can be used for visualisation. Many cases were studied, and one is presented in detail. The report concludes by demonstrating how this approach can be used to build a software tool that automates the visualisation task. Furthermore, understanding a system is of critical importance to a developer who must be able to understand the business processes being modeled by the system along with the system’s functionality, structure, events, and interactions with external entities. Such an understanding is of even more importance in reverse engineering. Although developers have the advantage of having the source code available, system documentation is often missing or incomplete, and the original users, whose requirements were used to design the system, are often long gone.


2012 ◽  
pp. 102-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Gebhart

This chapter focuses on the identification and specification of services based on prior modeled business processes and legacy systems. The resulting service interfaces and service components formalized by using the Service oriented architecture Modeling Language (SoaML) describe the integration of legacy systems into a service-oriented application landscape. The legacy systems provide services for integration purposes and represent the implementations of service components. Additionally, the resulting architecture allows functionality of legacy systems to be replaced with functionality provided by external cloud services. According to model-driven development concepts, the formalized service interfaces and service components as part of the service designs can be used to automatically derive service interface descriptions using the Web Services Description Language (WSDL). These descriptions enable the technical integration of legacy systems. If necessary, service implementations based on the Service Component Architecture (SCA) and the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) can be generated.


Author(s):  
Masoom Alam ◽  
Mohammad Nauman ◽  
Xinwen Zhang ◽  
Tamleek Ali ◽  
Patrick Hung ◽  
...  

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an architectural paradigm that enables dynamic composition of heterogeneous, independent, multi-vendor business services. A prerequisite for such inter-organizational workflows is the establishment of trustworthiness, which is mostly achieved through non-technical measures, such as legislation, and/or social consent that businesses or organizations pledge themselves to adhere. A business process can only be trustworthy if the behavior of all services in it is trustworthy. Trusted Computing Group (TCG) has defined an open set of specifications for the establishment of trustworthiness through a hardware root-of-trust. This paper has three objectives: firstly, the behavior of individual services in a business process is formally specified. Secondly, to overcome the inherent weaknesses of trust management through software alone, a hardware root of-trust devised by the TCG, is used for the measurement of the behavior of individual services in a business process. Finally, a verification mechanism is detailed through which the trustworthiness of a business process can be verified.


2019 ◽  
Vol 0 (9/2019) ◽  
pp. 33-44
Author(s):  
Tadeusz Nowicki ◽  
Adrian Woźniak

Service Oriented Architecture is popular in many organizations. In particular, it has already deeply rooted in large corporations that need to automate entire business processes and implement them in many systems. It has a unique feature that allows unambiguously indicate service that is to realise business process step. That indication is possible to show directly in BPMN diagram. Thus, it is possible to trace which server has used resources to implement the service and how much of those resources were needed. Therefore, it is possible to build an optimization task that, with limited and unreliable resources, will determine such allocation of components to servers and such an algorithm for assigning tasks to them, so that the processes will work as well as possible. The article presents a model of such an optimization task. This model consists of four layers. The Organization Layer describes the system environment – the types and frequency of initiating business process instances. The Integration Layer describes the business processes and indicates the services that should be performed at every step. The Component Layer describes component characteristics and what services they provide. In Server Layer both: server characteristics and runtime environments necessary for the component to run are described. Finally, the optimization task and evaluation criteria are formulated.


2010 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 14-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rong Liu ◽  
Frederick Y. Wu ◽  
Santhosh Kumaran

Much of the prior work in business process modeling is activity-centric. Recently, an information-centric approach has emerged, where a business process is modeled as the interacting lifecycles of business entities. The benefits of this approach are documented in a number of case studies. In this paper, the authors formalize the information-centric approach and derive the relationships between the two approaches. The authors formally define the notion of a business entity, provide an algorithm to transform an activity-centric model into an information-centric process model, and demonstrate the equivalence between these two models. Further, they show the value of transforming from the activity-centric paradigm to the information-centric paradigm in business process componentization and Service-Oriented Architecture design and also provide an empirical evaluation.


Author(s):  
Xiaoxian Yang ◽  
Tao Yu ◽  
Huahu Xu

In open and changeful Internet, the enterprise business process needs to be organized or restructured dynamically in order to adapt to environment changes and business logic updates. The solution of Web service and service-oriented architecture (SOA) provides a promising approach. The business processes working as a temporary workflow can be composed by distributed services. However, the cross-organizational service feature of business process requires considering not only the functional requirements but also the timed constraints. The timed property plays an important role in service interactions between business processes, such as timed activity, timeout and timed deadlock. Thus, if time requirements cannot be guaranteed, the new created business process will not be acceptable. In this paper, it proposes a framework of using Petri Net to model timed service business process. First, it defines the behavior model of service business process and gives process composition patterns for different structural forms. Second, service model is extended with time specifications, describing timed constraints among business activity interactions. Third, to support further verifications, it introduces a method for the automatic timed properties generation in the form of temporal logic formulae. Our framework gives a reference in practice to formalize service business process into timed service model.


Author(s):  
Latha Sadanandam

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a mechanism for achieving interoperability between heterogeneous systems. SOA enables existing legacy systems to expose their functionality as services, without making significant changes to the legacy systems. Migration towards a service-oriented approach (SOA) not only standardizes interaction, but also allows for more flexibility in the existing process. Web services technology is an ideal technology choice for implementing a SOA. Web services can be implemented in any programming language. The functionality of Web services range from simple request-reply to full business process. These services can be newly developed applications or just wrapper program for existing business functions to be network-enabled. The strategy is to form a framework to integrate z/OS assets in distributed environment using SOA approach, to enable optimal business agility and flexibility. Mainframe applications run the business and contain critical business logic that is unique, difficult, and costly to replicate. Enabling existing applications allows reusing critical business assets and leveraging the assets as a service to be invoked in heterogeneous environment.


Author(s):  
Mohamed El Amine Chergui ◽  
Sidi Mohamed Benslimane

Several approaches for services development in SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) suggest business processes as a starting point. However, there is a lack of systematic methods for services identification during business analysis. It is recognized that in service engineering, service identification plays a critical role as it lays the foundation for the later phases. Existing Service identification approaches are often prescriptive and mostly ignore automation principles, most are based on the architect's knowledge thus could result in non-optimal designs which results in complicated dependencies between services. In this paper the authors propose a top down approach to identify automatically services from business process by using several design metrics. This approach produces services from business processes as input and using an improved combinatorial particle swarm optimization algorithm with crossover of genetic algorithm. The experimentation denotes that the authors' approach achieves better results in terms of performance and convergence speed.


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