Web service interfaces design for e-business applications

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.As a result of the rapid developments in Web Service standards and technologies during the last decade, many organisations are implementing applications using Web Services. Some organisations are making significant commitments to Web Service standards and technology platforms. Successful projects using Web Services will to a large extent depend on the effective design and development methodologies used in the construction of an e-business application. While the importance of application design in general is recognised, so far only limited attention has been paid to design issues for service-oriented e-business applications. Currently there are no comprehensive methodologies for designing service interfaces. The traditional e-business interoperability approach is for business partners to interchange the industry standard business documents or XML messages (i.e. UBL, OTA). This approach is complex and inefficient because the business document is large and results in many optional and repeated elements that are redundant. Developing Web Services for e-business is time-consuming due to the considerable effort required to define the interfaces and maintaining a large volume of standard business documents. This work proposes to use the minimalist design approach to optimise a set of standard business documents and interfaces. The proposed interface is exposed as an abstract layer to the external parties and is able to process multiple actions corresponding to a business document. The method is based on analysing existing business documents, identifying the key elements responsible for an operation, and then exposing the operation interface that corresponds to the business document rather than the business event. This can be achieved by inserting business event action elements into the XML schema. Doing so will not only reduce the number of operation interfaces but also increase the Web Service interface’s flexibility and extendibility. Web Service implementation projects conducted in the absence of a design framework are likely to suffer from poor reuse and extensibility. In order to achieve reusability, this method enables the operation to be invoked based on individual action or multiple actions for the same interface. This is because a single action operation typically represents a fine-grained business task. Consequently, the interface is always extendable due to using multiple actions in the operation. Finally, this thesis will detail the above mentioned methodology to optimise e-business Web Service interface to become more flexible, reusable and extendable. We will illustrate the design methodology using a purchase order business process example based on the Universal Business Language specification in order to demonstrate its effectiveness

BUILDING RELIABLE AND ROBUST SERVICE-BASED SYSTEMS FOR AUTOMATED BUSINESS PROCESSES

An exciting trend in enterprise computing lies in the integration of applications across an organisation and even between organisations. This allows the provision of services by automated business processes that coordinate business activity among several collaborating organisations. The best successes in this type of integrated distributed system come through use of Web Services and Service-based Architecture, which allow interoperation between applications through open standards based on XML and SOAP. But still, there are unresolved issues when developers seek to build a reliable and robust system. An important goal for the designers of a loosely coupled distributed system is to maintain consistency for each long running business process in the presence of failures and concurrent activities. Our approach to assist the developers in this domain is to guide the developers with the key principles they must consider, and to provide programming models and protocols, which make it easier to detect and avoid consistency faults in service-based system. We start by defining a realistic e-procurement scenario to illustrate the common problems faced by the developers which prevent them from building a reliable and robust system. These problems make it hard to maintain the consistency of the data and state during the execution of a business process in the occurrence of failures and interference from concurrent activities. Through the analysis of the common problems, we identify key principles the developers must consider to avoid producing the common problems. Then based on the key principles, we provide a framework called GAT in the orchestration infrastructure. GAT allows developers to express all the necessary processing to handle deviations including those due to failures and concurrent activities. We discuss the GAT framework in detail with its structure and key features. Using an example taken from part of the e-procurement case study, we illustrate how developers can use the framework to design their business requirements. We also discuss how key features of the new framework help the developers to avoid producing consistency faults. We illustrate how systems based on our framework can be built using today’s proven technology. Finally, we provide a unified isolation mechanism called Promises that is not only applicable to our GAT framework, but also to any applications that run in the service-based world. We discuss the concept, how it works, and how it defines a protocol. We also provide a list of potential implementation techniques. Using some of the implementation techniques we mention, we provide a proof-of-concept prototype system

Integration of BPM systems

New technologies have emerged to support the global economy where for instance suppliers, manufactures and retailers are working together in order to minimise the cost and maximise efficiency. One of the technologies that has become a buzz word for many businesses is business process management or BPM. A business process comprises activities and tasks, the resources required to perform each task, and the business rules linking these activities and tasks. The tasks may be performed by human and/or machine actors. Workflow provides a way of describing the order of execution and the dependent relationships between the constituting activities of short or long running processes. Workflow allows businesses to capture not only the information but also the processes that transform the information - the process asset (Koulopoulos, T. M., 1995). Applications which involve automated, human-centric and collaborative processes across organisations are inherently different from one organisation to another. Even within the same organisation but over time, applications are adapted as ongoing change to the business processes is seen as the norm in today’s dynamic business environment. The major difference lies in the specifics of business processes which are changing rapidly in order to match the way in which businesses operate. In this chapter we introduce and discuss Business Process Management (BPM) with a focus on the integration of heterogeneous BPM systems across multiple organisations. We identify the problems and the main challenges not only with regards to technologies but also in the social and cultural context. We also discuss the issues that have arisen in our bid to find the solutions

Specifications and Development of Interoperability Solution dedicated to Multiple Expertise Collaboration in a Design Framework

This paper describes the specifications of an interoperability platform based on the PPO (Product Process Organization) model developed by the French community IPPOP in the context of collaborative and innovative design. By using PPO model as a reference, this work aims to connect together heterogonous tools used by experts easing data and information exchanges. After underlining the growing needs of collaborative design process, this paper focuses on interoperability concept by describing current solutions and their limits. Then a solution based on the flexibility of the PPO model adapted to the philosophy of interoperability is proposed. To illustrate these concepts, several examples are more particularly described (robustness analysis, CAD and Product Lifecycle Management systems connections)