A Behavior-Aware Systematic Approach for Merging Business Process Fragments

Abstract

Recent researches have proposed to retrieve relevant fragments out from whole business processes to build new ones. Although they avoid building business processes from scratch, this task has been performed independently for each process, thus, making resulting fragments handling complicated. In this paper, we propose to merge some given business process fragments in order to facilitate the fragment-based business process design. At the same time, the obtained fragment must keep the behavior of original fragments so as to avoid paths execution blockage while the obtained fragments are integrated as part of a complete process. Our approach presents a systematic merge revolving around the so-called adjacency matrices. Typically used to handle graphs, this mechanism is adapted to business process fragments. We also present some rules to provide the obtained fragments with the behavior of original fragments and avoid inconsistent behaviors that were newly added after the merge.

Multicloud service composition: A survey of current approaches and issues

“…A BPF is a connected subprocess generated for later purpose (mostly a reuse purpose) from existing business processes. A BPF is a set of abstract tasks (also called activities) related using control flow, which represents the execution order between them . Unlike BPF, an SPF can be seen as a concrete (executable) BPF, in which a concrete Web service is allocated to each abstract task in the BPF …”

“…Reusing fragments from existing service processes not only can allow respecting the delivery deadlines but also can improve the reliability and efficiency of the whole process . Furthermore, business rules existing in the original processes are much more than those existing in the generated fragments, which makes the composition more easier …”

“…Recently, process fragments reuse has emerged as a powerful method to effectively and rapidly deliver cloud service compositions. 72 A BPF is a connected subprocess generated for later purpose (mostly a reuse purpose) from existing business processes. A BPF is a set of abstract tasks (also called activities) related using control flow, which represents the execution order between them.…”

“…A BPF is a set of abstract tasks (also called activities) related using control flow, which represents the execution order between them. 72 Unlike BPF, an SPF can be seen as a concrete (executable) BPF, in which a concrete Web service is allocated to each abstract task in the BPF. 58 Reusing fragments from existing service processes not only can allow respecting the delivery deadlines but also can improve the reliability and efficiency of the whole process.…”

“…58 Furthermore, business rules existing in the original processes are much more than those existing in the generated fragments, which makes the composition more easier. 72 To avoid the redesign of existing fragments, some researchers decompose the existing service processes to generate reusable process fragments.…”