Business Level Service-Oriented Enterprise Application Integration

In this paper we propose a new approach for service-oriented enterprise application integration (EAI). Unlike current EAI solutions, which mainly focus on technological aspects, our approach allows business domain experts to get more involved in the integration process. First, we provide a technique for modeling application services at a sufficiently high level of abstraction for business experts to work with. Next, these business experts can model the orchestration as well as the information mappings that are required to achieve their integration goals. Our mediation framework then takes over and realizes the integration solution by transforming these models to existing service orchestration technology

Transforming Internal Activities of Business Process Models to Services Compositions

As a service composition language, BPEL imposes as constraint that a business process model should consist only of activities for interacting with other business processes. BPEL provides limited support for implementing internal activities, i.e. activities that are performed by a single business process without involvement of other business processes. BPEL is hence not suitable to implement internal activities that include complex data manipulation. There are a number of options to make BPEL able to implement such internal activities. In this paper we analyse those options based on their feasibility, efficiency, reusability, portability and merging. The analysis indicates that delegating internal activities’ functionality to other services is the best option. We therefore present an approach for transforming internal activities to service invocations. The application of this approach on a business process model results in a service composition model that consists only of activities for interaction

Data integration through service-based mediation for web-enabled information systems

The Web and its underlying platform technologies have often been used to integrate existing software and information systems. Traditional techniques for data representation and transformations between documents are not sufficient to support a flexible and maintainable data integration solution that meets the requirements of modern complex Web-enabled software and information systems. The difficulty arises from the high degree of complexity of data structures, for example in business and technology applications, and from the constant change of data and its representation. In the Web context, where the Web platform is used to integrate different organisations or software systems, additionally the problem of heterogeneity arises. We introduce a specific data integration solution for Web applications such as Web-enabled information systems. Our contribution is an integration technology framework for Web-enabled information systems comprising, firstly, a data integration technique based on the declarative specification of transformation rules and the construction of connectors that handle the integration and, secondly, a mediator architecture based on information services and the constructed connectors to handle the integration process

Formal certification and compliance for run-time service environments

With the increased awareness of security and safety of services in on-demand distributed service provisioning (such as the recent adoption of Cloud infrastructures), certification and compliance checking of services is becoming a key element for service engineering. Existing certification techniques tend to support mainly design-time checking of service properties and tend not to support the run-time monitoring and progressive certification in the service execution environment. In this paper we discuss an approach which provides both design-time and runtime behavioural compliance checking for a services architecture, through enabling a progressive event-driven model-checking technique. Providing an integrated approach to certification and compliance is a challenge however using analysis and monitoring techniques we present such an approach for on-going compliance checking

Towards a flexible service integration through separation of business rules

Driven by dynamic market demands, enterprises are continuously exploring collaborations with others to add value to their services and seize new market opportunities. Achieving enterprise collaboration is facilitated by Enterprise Application Integration and Business-to-Business approaches that employ architectural paradigms like Service Oriented Architecture and incorporate technological advancements in networking and computing. However, flexibility remains a major challenge related to enterprise collaboration. How can changes in demands and opportunities be reflected in collaboration solutions with minimum time and effort and with maximum reuse of existing applications? This paper proposes an approach towards a more flexible integration of enterprise applications in the context of service mediation. We achieve this by combining goal-based, model-driven and serviceoriented approaches. In particular, we pay special attention to the separation of business rules from the business process of the integration solution. Specifying the requirements as goal models, we separate those parts which are more likely to evolve over time in terms of business rules. These business rules are then made executable by exposing them as Web services and incorporating them into the design of the business process.\ud Thus, should the business rules change, the business process remains unaffected. Finally, this paper also provides an evaluation of the flexibility of our solution in relation to the current work in business process flexibility research

Combining goal-oriented and model-driven approaches to solve the Payment Problem Scenario

Motivated by the objective to provide an improved participation of business domain experts in the design of service-oriented integration solutions, we extend our previous work on using the COSMO methodology for service mediation by introducing a goal-oriented approach to requirements engineering. With this approach, business requirements including the motivations behind the mediation solution are better understood, specified, and aligned with their technical implementations. We use the Payment Problem Scenario of the SWS Challenge to illustrate the extension

WSCDL to WSBPEL: A Case Study of ATL-based Transformation

The ATLAS Transformation Language (ATL) is a hybrid transformation language that combines declarative and imperative programming elements and provides means to define model transformations. Most transformations using ATL reported in the literature show a simplified use of ATL, and often involve a single transformation. However, in more realistic situations, multiple transformations may be necessary, especially in case the original input/output models are not represented in the metametamodeling representation expected by the transformation engine. In this paper, we discuss a model transformation from service choreography (WSCDL) to service orchestration (WSBPEL), which cannot be performed in a single ATL transformation due to the mismatch between the concrete XML syntax of these languages and the metametamodeling representation expected by the ATL transformation engine. This requires auxiliary transformations in which this mismatch is resolved. In principle, the required auxiliary transformations can be implemented using XSLT or a general-purpose programming language like Java. However, in our case study, we evaluate the use of ATL to perform these transformations. We exploit ATL by leveraging the ATL's XML\ud injection and the XML extraction mechanisms to perform the overall transformation in terms of a transformation chain