Flexible Loosely Coupled inter-organizational workflows using SOA

Abstract

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a paradigm that provides important properties for the development of business applications like flexibility and loose coupling. In our research work, we focus on the use of SOA to implement specific architectures of inter-organizational workflows (IOWF). The current paper deals with the "Loosely Coupled Workflow" specifying an IOWF-architecture that connects two or more workflows-attached to a set of business partners-communicating in an asynchronous manner according to a public communication protocol conjointly defined by all partners. The first issue of this work is to define a service based cooperation pattern called LC-IOWF pattern suitable to the architecture considered in order to obtain IOWF models flexible enough to ease their adaptation. The proposed LC-IOWF pattern is based on three main dimensions: services, control of execution and interactions. Then, we define three categories of adaptation patterns corresponding to the three dimensions exhibited. Particularly, the third category of these patterns called "Interaction adaptation patterns" concerns adaptations affecting the communication protocol and constitutes a specific type of adaptation compared with other IOWF-architectures. For implementation, we consider IOWF models specified with BPEL.

Addressing inter-organisational process flexibility using versions: The VP2M approach

“…However, some contributions addressed flexibility by looseness in the context of dynamic loosely coupled IoP recommending solutions to face unavailability of partner process [10,13]. Regarding the other flexibility needs (evolution, variability and adaptation), which are related to the flexibility of loosely coupled IoP schemas, we mention [27][28], [29][30] and [12].…”

“…More precisely, they provide a set of algorithms to deal with changes of process schema by adding, deleting, replacing or updating process fragments, but they do not consider changes that can affect messages (i.e., information) exchanged between process partners. Secondly, [29][30] proposed a service-based approach to model the loosely coupled inter-organisational processes by combining processes and SOA. More precisely, they provide high-level patterns for service (adding, removing, substituting services), control flow and interaction adaptation.…”

“…With respect to related works previously presented ( [27][28], [29][30] and [12]), our approach differs from [12] and [27][28] as the basis of these works is BPMN. For instance, [12] extends the BPMN meta-model for collaborations with the notion of version to model version of collaborations.…”

“…In addition, data is poorly represented and there is no collaborative modelling environment for such processes. Finally, [29][30] only addresses flexibility by evolution with no support of process abstraction and assembly. Table I evaluates the previous contributions with respect to the requirements of [15] as follows: + (-) respectively means that the requirement is supported (not supported) while +/means that the requirement is partially supported.…”

Service Based Cooperation Patterns to Support Flexible Inter-Organizational Workflows

“…The approaches suitable to planed cooperation are rigid and are based on predefined protocols. Our framework "S-IOFLOW" provides three aspects of flexibility: (i) the selection of the IOWF-architecture to build; (ii) the definition of composite cooperation patterns by reusing elementary ones to build more complex IOWF models, (iii) our framework is extended with adaptation and evolution modules for structural and functional adaptation of IOWF models; some adaptation and evolution patterns are described in [41], [42].…”