Planning and monitoring the execution of web service requests

Interaction with web services enabled marketplaces would be greatly facilitated if users were given a high level service request language to express their goals in complex business domains. This could be achieved by using a planning framework which monitors the execution of planned goals against predefined standard business processes and interacts with the user to achieve goal satisfaction. We present a planning architecture that accepts high level requests, expressed in XSRL (Xml Service Request Language). The planning framework is based on the principle of interleaving planning and execution. This is accomplished on the basis of refinement and revision as new service-related information is gathered from UDDI and web services instances, and as execution circumstances necessitate change. The system interacts with the user whenever confirmation or verification is needed

Service-oriented computing: concepts, characteristics and directions

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is the computing paradigm that utilizes services as fundamental elements for developing applications/solutions. To build the service model, SOC relies on the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), which is a way of reorganizing software applications and infrastructure into a set of interacting services. However, the basic SOA does not address overarching concerns such as management, service orchestration, service transaction management and coordination, security, and other concerns that apply to all components in a services architecture. In this paper we introduce an Extended Service Oriented Architecture that provides separate tiers for composing and coordinating services and for managing services in an open marketplace by employing grid services.

XSRL: An XML web-services request language

One of the most serious challenges that web-service enabled e-marketplaces face is the lack of formal support for expressing service requests against UDDI-resident web-services in order to solve a complex business problem. In this paper we present a web-service request language (XSRL) developed on the basis of AI planning and the XML database query language XQuery. This framework is designed to handle and execute XSRL requests and is capable of performing planning actions under uncertainty on the basis of refinement and revision as new service-related information is accumulated (via interaction with the user or UDDI) and as execution circumstances necessitate change

ENFORCING COMPLIANCE ON BUSINESS PROCESSES THROUGH THE USE OF PATTERNS

In the past recent years, business process compliance has become an area of significant concern to many organizations. Despite an increasing number of methods and tools, organizations are still facing difficulties in finding effective support to ensure that their business processes comply with the requirements set forth by regulations, laws, standards, etc. While manual solutions offer limited assurance for compliance, there is a lack of a comprehensive framework for semi-automatically managing compliance requirements and ensuring compliance throughout all the phases of business process lifecycle. One of the foundational building blocks of such a framework is a generic conceptual model that supports factoring compliance and its relation to business processes. This paper introduces a compliance conceptual model to capture and manage compliance requirements and to relate them to business processes in a transparent and verifiable manner. The model also incorporates a set of patterns to facilitate the specification of formal compliance rules to be used for automated compliance verification and monitoring. We have developed a set of integrated tools that supports our framework and partially validated the framework in two case studies involving industry companies