Enhancing conflict detecting mechanism for Web Services composition: A business process flow model transformation approach

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Abstract

Businesses today are keenly aware of the competitive role of information technology. However, there is still a need for application systems to be implemented for support of daily business operations. However, these systems may be developed or acquired at different times from different vendors, and thus may be incompatible with each other. Because of this, a number of standards and technologies have been addressed to draw an integral vision in the field of enterprise application integration (EAI).

Emerging Web Services has now promised enterprises that they can deploy new digital services faster than ever before by integrating the existing application systems. By integrating in this fashion, operational processes of heterogeneous systems are seamlessly controlled and integrated through a meta-processes. This integration could preserve the autonomy of original systems, as well as enhance the flexibility and agility of the business. The researchers who constructed this study have attempted to explore in detail the design of these meta-processes. Also the researchers have proposed a conflict detecting mechanism (CDM) in order to aid process designers. A prototype with a case study has been developed to evaluate the feasibility of the CDM, and the results show that it is useful in guiding process designers to correct and improve their designed meta-processes.

Introduction

When applying information technology (IT) for commercial purposes, businesses were gradually motivated by the progressive benefits and strategic advantages they could potentially realize. In the past, companies used to adopt or develop many different kinds of application systems to support their daily operations. However, as the degree to which a company relies on IT increases, the integration problems it will face as a result of IT reliance becomes more complex [1]. The predominant problem occurring in many businesses today is that initial systems were developed or acquired at different times from different vendors, operated on different software or hardware technologies, and as a result are incompatible with each other [2]. This is the so-called “islands of information systems” phenomenon [3], [4], [5]. Because of the increased need for integration, standards, and technologies have been directed towards forming an integral vision in the field of enterprise application integration (EAI) [6].

The concept of using emerging Web Services has promised that enterprises can quickly deploy new digital services by integrating existing application systems [7]. When deploying this type of integration, the operational processes of heterogeneous systems are seamlessly controlled and integrated through meta-processes. This integration preserves the autonomy of original systems, as well as enhances flexibility and agility [8], [9].

Organizations are now trying to move increase the process integration level due to greater expectations that it can yield large benefits. The achievement of this goal is still problematic due largely to that fact that it lacks a systematic approach to support the design of integral meta-processes [10], [11], [12], [13]. Previous literature [11], [14], [15] had indicated that flaws in a designed business process would lead to high throughput times, low service levels, and a need for excess capacity. Therefore, in order to minimize risk, it is important to analyze the correctness, effectiveness, and efficiency of existing processes before they are changed[11], [16]. Integral processes that contain errors may lead to frustrated customers, backlog, damage claims, and loss of goodwill.

Furthermore, there exists a gap between traditional process design and meta-process integration as enterprises migrate to Web-based services. Process designers are used to design business processes in the form of graphical diagrams, however, the meta-process designing approach requires representing different processes based on XML specifications.

As a result, in this proposed research, we define conflicts as any cause that could violate the normal or expected states of business process execution. In addition, we restrict the scope of this study to focus on conflict detection and design gaps of the meta-processes at the design stage when using Web-based services.

In this paper, we investigate the design of integral meta-processes and propose a conflict detecting mechanism (CDM), which plays an aiding role for process designers. We define conflicts as events that could lead to the designed integral meta-process violating the normal or expected results that it should be yielding. As a result, two main research questions are addressed in this paper and are explained in the following:

  • Process design gap

There exists a gap between traditional process design and process integration when enterprises migrate to the use of Web-based services [17], [18], [19]. To aid in understanding existing processes, designers must represent business processes using an abstract graphical model. These integral meta-processes must be formatted in XML-based specifications. Next, Web-based Services composition engines could automatically execute the designed meta-processes. Unfortunately, writing XML-based process specifications only by a text-editor (which does not support useful XML character functions) is time consuming and erroneous work [13]. Not to mention the fact that it is difficult to ask traditional process designers to do such these jobs.

  • Systematic designing guideline

Today, many organizations with sophisticated business processes have identified the need for concepts, techniques, and tools to support the management of their business processes in an integrated manner. However, in the current market, the available business process management systems give limited support to systematically analyzing the possible conflicts of meta-processes during the design (or redesign) phase [11], [12]. There needs to be a systematic approach to provide design guidelines that can support process designers, as well as allow them to correct and improve their designed meta-processes.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: In Section 2, we review related literature in the field of business process. In Sections 3 Bridging process design gap, 4 Systematic designing guideline, we present the design of solutions for two research problems. In Section 5, we describe the implementation of a prototype system, namely a CDM system. We evaluate our research utilizing a simulation and a real case study. The comparison between our research efforts and related works is provided in Section 6. The paper is concluded in Section 7.

Section snippets

Web Services composition

The trend of EAI has recently received considerable attention in the field of enterprise integration. However, the progress is still problematic as only a few EAI solutions are currently available. Lack of consensus in both the integration standards and the technologies is still a critical barrier to enterprises looking to adopt an EAI solution [1], [5], [13], [20], [21]. Among many proposed technologies, models, and architectures for EAI, an increased amount of attention has been given to a

Bridging process design gap

The first research question we addressed was the reason for the existence of a design gap between graphical process modeling and XML-based process specifications. As more enterprises want to embrace the benefits of Web Services composition, an effective transformation method should be developed to bridge such a gap. It should support process designers by directly transforming graphical process diagrams into the desired XML-based process specification like BPEL4WS or BPML.

Since own research

Conflict detecting mechanism (CDM)

The second research question addressed in this report concerns the methods required to support process designers in analyzing possible conflicts when they are participating in meta-process design. In the Web Services environment, the purpose of business process integration is to leverage existing enterprise application systems into new services. It is essential to detect possible conflicts contained in the integral processes before it is put into execution; this is a major factor in risk

System architecture

In order to support the procedures of the proposed CDM, a corresponding integrated developing environment (IDE) system, namely the CDM system, was developed. Fig. 7 demonstrates the system architecture of our CDM system, which aims to facilitate meta-process design and possible conflict detection.

The operation of our CDM system is based on a graphical user interface that interacts with the process designer at the first level. It also aids in bridging the process design gap. Analysis methods for

Simulated integration scenario

In order to evaluate the feasibility of the proposed design gap bridging rules and the CDM, it is useful to set up a simulated run-time environment for Web Services composition. The Collaxa BPEL Orchestration Server 2.0 [74] is the first announced commercial product that provides a scalable and reliable run-time environment for deploying, executing, and managing BPEL processes according to BPEL4WS specifications.

The simulated integration scenario that we used for evaluation was provided by

Conclusion and limitation

In this report, the researchers addressed two fundamental questions in the field of meta-process integration. The results of this research indeed show that the process design gap and systematic design guidelines are important issues in supporting process designers throughout their works in the context of Web Services composition. We also found that there is an increasing number of related works focused on bridging the process design gap. However, to the researchers’ current knowledge, there is

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