Managing large collections of business process models - Current techniques and challenges

Nowadays, business process management is an important approach for managing organizations from an operational perspective. As a consequence, it is common to see organizations develop collections of hundreds or even thousands of business process models. Such large collections of process models bring new challenges and provide new opportunities, as the knowledge that they encapsulate requires to be properly managed. Therefore, a variety of techniques for managing large collections of business process models is being developed. The goal of this paper is to provide an overview of the management techniques that currently exist, as well as the open research challenges that they pose

Efficient Matchmaking of Business Processes in Web Service Infrastructures

The problem addressed in this dissertation can be stated as follows: given as a query, a business process description within a Web service infrastructure, efficiently find business processes from a large repository that complementarily support the input query. In particular, the input business process enforces that some parts of the business process be mandatory. For example, a buyer organization using RosettaNet PIPs and the corresponding data dictionary might want to find suppliers that use the same RosettaNet standard that fulfill his business process. In this case, for instance, a mandatory cancellation procedure of the processing would be executed after the order had been placed with the supplier. The current Web service standards around Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) and related technologies do not address this problem as they offer only service discovery based on attribute/ value queries, that is limited to atomic service discovery. Research has shown that Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS or BPEL for short), which is currently used to express business processes in Web service environments, does not have a solid formal model and thus lacks formal semantics for querying business process descriptions. This means that a formal model is required to express business processes and to enable their querying. Based on this formal model, appropriate indexing techniques are needed for efficient querying in large service repositories. A business process can be described as a set of message sequences each representing a potential execution sequence of the process. Based on this model, business processes are queried by finding matching business processes within the repository; the matching operation can be defined by computing a common set of message sequences covering the mandatory parts. The business process matchmaking semantics can be formalized by modelling business processes using an enrichment of finite state automata (FSAs) with propositional logical expressions. We call the enriched FSAs annotated finite state automata (aFSAs). aFSAs can express message sequences (potentially infinite) in a business process while logical expressions express mandatory as well as optional parts of the business process. A business process matchmaking is formally defined as the non-empty intersection of aFSAs, covering mandatory parts of the business process description. Computing the intersection of aFSAs is computationally expensive being more than quadratic on the number of states and transitions. Further, sequentially scanning large service repositories to find matching business processes will not scale even if individual query operations were simple. The traditional way to speed-up query performance operations in databases is to use indexes. However, indexes for intersection-based queries on aFSAs are also not supported by standard database indexing techniques such as B+-trees. An option is to construct an index based on aFSA message sequences and annotations, and using message sequence equivalence as well as the evaluation of annotations to realize intersection operations. However, the number of message sequences in an aFSA may be infinite due to cycles in the business process specification. In this dissertation a formal model for indexing and querying business processes is developed. The indexing approach is based on abstractions to transform aFSAs via their grammars into forms that can be indexed by available indexing mechanisms like B+-trees. The indexing approach is implemented and evaluated. Evaluation results show that the index outperforms sequential scanning by several orders of magnitude. An analysis of evaluation results also shows that the index scales well with increasing data set sizes and exhibits good computational properties for searching, being approximately linear on the number of aFSAs in the data collection

Indexing business processes based on annotated finite state automata

The existing service discovery infrastructure with UDDI as the de facto standard, is limited in that it does not support more complex searching based on matching business processes. Two business processes match if they agree on their simple services, their processing order as well as any mandatory or optional requirements for the service. This matching semantics can be formalized by modelling business processes as annotated finite state automata (aFSAs) and deciding emptiness of the intersection aFSA. Computing the intersection of aFSAs and deciding emptiness are computationally expensive, being more than quadratic on the number of states and transitions, thus does not scale for large service repositories. This paper presents an approach for indexing and matching business processes modeled as aFSAs, for the purpose of service discovery. Evaluation of this approach shows a performance gain of several orders of magnitude over sequential matching and a linear complexity with regard to the data set size

IPSI-PF: A business process Matchmaking engine

Success of web services mainly depends on the availability of tools facilitating usage of technology within the addressed B2B integration problems. One severe problem in loosely coupled systems is service discovery including a sufficient matchmaking definition. The conceptfor service discovery in web service architecture is UDDI providing limited querying functionality and not being capable to deal with the multiple dimensions of a service, like for example semantic, workflow, or Quality ofService aspects. The IPSI Process Finder (IPSI-PF) provides a matchmaking definition and an engine focusing on process aspects. In particular, the matchmaking engine realizes service discovery by extending the capabilities of UDDI to ease the integration with additional UDDI extensions addressing other service description dimensions

Classification of Ad hoc Multi-lateral collaborations based on local workflow models

Establishing multi-lateral collaborations based on local workflows without having a global workflow is complicated, because the set of requirements used for the searching and matchmaking of trading partners is underspecified. The issue is to consider inter-dependencies of trading partners within a local workflow on the one hand side and between services on the other hand side. Within this paper, we suggest to develop an abstract model for establishing multilateral collaborations and propose a classification schema based on this model. The classification later on can be used to focus on particular aspects of the problem space and to develop solutions for different clusters within the problem domain

My body, your body, our bodies.

Service discovery in web service infrastructure must consider abstract processes to guarantee successful business interactions with the matched services. Unfortunately, matchmaking process annotations requires a significant processing effort, thus, finding relevant service providers in a large collection is time consuming and requires more efficient access methods than sequential scanning. The paper presents an approach supporting more efficient querying of abstract processes by introducing an abstraction to reduce the computational complexity of the comparison operation. Experimental studies on a collection of over 800 abstract business processes derived from the RosettaNet PIP specification show that our approach outperforms naive sequential scanning by up to an order of magnitude

Towards a Platform for Supporting the Buyer in Trading in Heterogeneous Marketplaces

While the number of electronic marketplaces has increased on the Internet, tools to help buyers in participating in these marketplaces (heterogeneous marketplaces) are lacking. As part of the European Union funded eBroker project on electronic marketplaces, we attempt to address this problem by developing tools that help buyers in trading in these electronic marketplaces. This paper addresses the following issues: problems buyers face when trading in heterogeneous marketplaces, sources of problems, and how to solve them

IPSI-PF. A business process matchmaking engine based on annotated finite state automata

Success of Web services mainly depends on the availability of tools facilitating usage of technology within the addressed B2B integration problems. One severe problem in loosely coupled systems is service discovery including a sufficient matchmaking definition. The concept for service discovery in web service architecture is UDDI providing limited querying functionality and not being capable to deal with the multiple dimensions of a service, like for example semantic, workflow, or Quality of Service aspects. The IPSI Process Finder (IPSI-PF) realizes service discovery by extending the capabilities of UDDI by matchmaking of service descriptions. The extension is realized such that an integration of additional extensions can be added quite easily