Web Services Support for Dynamic Business Process Outsourcing

Outsourcing of business processes is crucial for organizations to be effective, efficient and flexible. To meet fast-changing market conditions, dynamic outsourcing is required, in which business relationships are established and enacted on-the-fly in an adaptive, fine-grained way unrestricted by geographic distance. This requires automated means for both the establishment of outsourcing relationships and for the enactment of services performed in these relationships over electronic channels. Due to wide industry support and the underlying model of loose coupling of services, Web services increasingly become the mechanism of choice to connect organizations across organizational boundaries. This paper analyzes to which extent Web services support the dynamic process outsourcing paradigm. We discuss contract -based dynamic business process outsourcing to define requirements and then introduce the Web services framework. Based on this, we investigate the match between the two. We observe that the Web services framework requires further support for cross - organizational business processes and mechanisms for contracting, QoS management and process-based transaction support and suggest ways to fill those gaps

Dynamic service composition for telecommunication services and its challenges

As communication networks have evolved towards IP (Internet Protocol) networks, telecommunication operators has expanded its reach to internet multimedia web content services while operating circuit-switch networks in parallel. With the adoption of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) that enables service capability interfaces to be published and integrated with other service capabilities into new composite service, service composition allows telecommunication providers to accelerate more new services provisioning. From the perspective of telecommunication providers to deliver integrated composite service from different providers and different network protocols, this paper is aimed to present the current service composition based on middleware approaches; discuss the requirements of meeting the challenges; and compare the approaches

Towards automated composition of convergent services: a survey

A convergent service is defined as a service that exploits the convergence of communication networks and at the same time takes advantage of features of the Web. Nowadays, building up a convergent service is not trivial, because although there are significant approaches that aim to automate the service composition at different levels in the Web and Telecom domains, selecting the most appropriate approach for specific case studies is complex due to the big amount of involved information and the lack of technical considerations. Thus, in this paper, we identify the relevant phases for convergent service composition and explore the existing approaches and their associated technologies for automating each phase. For each technology, the maturity and results are analysed, as well as the elements that must be considered prior to their application in real scenarios. Furthermore, we provide research directions related to the convergent service composition phases

A SOA-based architecture framework

We present an Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)– based architecture framework. The architecture framework is designed to be close to industry standards, especially to the Service Component Architecture (SCA). The framework is language independent and the building blocks of each system, activities and data, are first class citizens. We present a meta model of the architecture framework and discuss its concepts in detail. Through the framework, concepts of an SOA such as wiring, correlation and instantiation can be clarifie

Towards automated composition of convergent services: A survey

A convergent service is defined as a service that exploits the convergence of communication networks and at the same time takes advantage of features of the Web. Nowadays, building up a convergent service is not trivial, because although there are significant approaches that aim to automate the service composition at different levels in the Web and Telecom domains, selecting the most appropriate approach for specific case studies is complex due to the big amount of involved information and the lack of technical considerations. Thus, in this paper, we identify the relevant phases for convergent service composition and explore the existing approaches and their associated technologies for automating each phase. For each technology, the maturity and results are analysed, as well as the elements that must be considered prior to their application in real scenarios. Furthermore, we provide research directions related to the convergent service composition phases

Service composition based on SIP peer-to-peer networks

Today the telecommunication market is faced with the situation that customers are requesting for new telecommunication services, especially value added services. The concept of Next Generation Networks (NGN) seems to be a solution for this, so this concept finds its way into the telecommunication area. These customer expectations have emerged in the context of NGN and the associated migration of the telecommunication networks from traditional circuit-switched towards packet-switched networks. One fundamental aspect of the NGN concept is to outsource the intelligence of services from the switching plane onto separated Service Delivery Platforms using SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) to provide the required signalling functionality. Caused by this migration process towards NGN SIP has appeared as the major signalling protocol for IP (Internet Protocol) based NGN. This will lead in contrast to ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) and IN (Intelligent Network) to significantly lower dependences among the network and services and enables to implement new services much easier and faster. In addition, further concepts from the IT (Information Technology) namely SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) have largely influenced the telecommunication sector forced by amalgamation of IT and telecommunications. The benefit of applying SOA in telecommunication services is the acceleration of service creation and delivery. Main features of the SOA are that services are reusable, discoverable combinable and independently accessible from any location. Integration of those features offers a broader flexibility and efficiency for varying demands on services. This thesis proposes a novel framework for service provisioning and composition in SIP-based peer-to-peer networks applying the principles of SOA. One key contribution of the framework is the approach to enable the provisioning and composition of services which is performed by applying SIP. Based on this, the framework provides a flexible and fast way to request the creation for composite services. Furthermore the framework enables to request and combine multimodal value-added services, which means that they are no longer limited regarding media types such as audio, video and text. The proposed framework has been validated by a prototype implementation

Dynamic Multilevel Workflow Management Concept for Industrial IoT Systems

Workflow management is implemented in manufacturing at many levels. The nature of processes variesat each level, hindering the use of a standard modeling orimplementation solution. The creation of a flexible workflow management framework that overarches the heterogeneous business process levels is challenging. Still, one of the promisesof the Industry 4.0 initiative is precisely this: to provideeasy-to-use models and solutions that enable efficient execution of enterprise targets. By addressing this challenge, this articleproposes a workflow execution model that integrates information and control flows of these levels while keeping their hierarchy. The overall model builds on the business process model andnotation (BPMN) for modeling at the enterprise level and recipemodeling based on colored Petri net (CPN) at the production level. Models produced with both alternatives are implemented and executed in a framework supported by an enterprise servicebus (ESB). Loosely coupled, late-bound system elements are connected through the arrowhead framework, which is builtupon the service-oriented architecture (SOA) concept. To proveits feasibility, this article presents the practical application ofthe model via an automotive production scenario