Aligning Business Processes With the Services Layer Using a Semantic Approach

Abstract

Organizations require their business processes goals and the underlying information technology (IT) to be in synchronization with each other, but the continual changes in business processes makes this difficult. To accomplish this synchronization, there needs to be an alignment between the business processes and the IT. Business processes are currently defined using such well-known notations as BPMN, and the IT is made available by different services. Hence, the alignment process can be defined as one between the organization's BPMNs and the services provided by its IT. In practice, however, this process is a complex task which is carried out by hand and hence is error prone. The present communication analyzes the conditions, relations, and incompatibilities between BPMNs and the service descriptions. The incompatibilities are formalized mathematically in order to facilitate their identification and resolution. Then, an alignment process is defined taking into account these incompatibilities and their solutions. The wrapper code needed to resolve each incompatibility identified during the alignment process is generated automatically. Finally, a case study is presented to validate and illustrate the use of the proposed alignment process. The results provided by the semiautomatic alignment process were similar to those obtained manually by a group of experts. INDEX TERMS Alignment process support, business process alignment, service-oriented architecture, semantic algorithms, service incompatibility resolution. ENCARNA SOSA-SÁNCHEZ received the B.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of Granada, in 1995 and 2018, respectively. She is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree with the Computer Science Department, University of Extremadura, Spain. She is also an Assistant Professor with the Computer Science Department, University of Extremadura. She has published several peer-reviewed papers in international journals, workshops, and conferences. She is involved in several research projects. Her research interests include service-oriented architectures, business process modeling, and model-driven development.

Business Process Execution From the Alignment Between Business Processes and Web Services: A Semantic and Model-Driven Modernization Process

“…The Simple-SoaML model is used to define a model-to-text transformation to automatically generate the code for the underlying service layer. In other words, this generation provides an interoperable layer to interact with the core legacy website functionality [13], [66]. The service layer generated is based on SOAP web services [18], [67], [68] where each web service includes its own WSDL (Web Service Description Language).…”

“…As previously mentioned, this paper focuses on step (c) in Figure 1 where an alignment process is designed using a semantic service discovery algorithm. In this step (c), two main limitations identified in previous work [13]- [15] and introduced in section I have been overcome: i) the alignment process core, the semantic algorithm, proposed in [14], [66] compared directly the labels of the business process tasks with the web service method signature, without taking into account additional relationships like number of common synonyms or main name in synonyms which could be measured; ii) there were not specific tools with an enough high abstraction degree to support the alignment information obtained. The former has been solved by extending the semantic algorithm presented in [32] so that a new algorithm has been introduced in the approach.…”

“…In [14] we proposed a service discovery using a semantic algorithm based on [27]. In the work [66], we extended the semantic algorithm proposed in [14] to take into account the possible semantic incompatibilities that could arise between business process tasks and web services (incompatibilities between their names, parameters and entire signatures have been taken into account). The algorithm was also validated using a case study related to the University context.…”

“…The algorithm was also validated using a case study related to the University context. In this paper, as a paper contribution we have made an optimization of our semantic algorithm (the original and extended algorithm) [14], [66] using an adaptation of [32] to take into account hierarchical relationships between business process tasks and web services. Later on we sum up the results obtained with both algorithms.…”

“…In addition, there is other information that indicates whether this value is optimal or not (optimalAlignment attribute) or if this alignment is a ''special case'' (isSpecialCase attribute). A more detailed explanation of these attributes and the different alignment situations that arise are explained in the previous work [66]. In [66] some types of incompatibility are analyzed:…”