SMG24_PhdThesis[1].pdf (8.41 MB)
Policy-driven Reconfiguration of Service-targeted Business Processes
thesis
posted on 2011-11-18, 11:18 authored by Stephen Mark GortonWorkflows are a key part of Business Process Management, o ering the potential to automate
a number of business activities. Workflows are though constrained to their design,
i.e. workflow functionality does not extend outside its own specification. A relatively
small number of solutions to this inflexibility have been proposed. However, all
approaches so far are either at the orchestration level or are tightly-coupled with the workflow,
whereas we consider that the problem is at the business level and needs to be loosely
coupled from the workflow.
Significant value can be gained from separating core functionality in a workflow from
variability to that core process. Both can be defined separately and yet still corporately
execute to provide a variety of execution states that match the given context. Functionality
of the workflow can be supplied by Service Oriented Architecture.
Thus we define StPowla as a combination of workflows, policies and Service Oriented
Architecture. Workflows define the core business process, policies define the possible
variability of the processes and Service Oriented Architecture provides the underlying
functionality. We specifically present a set of reconfiguration functions that can be called
by policies on workflows and define each of these as graph transformation rules.
We provide an encoding from StPowla processes to SRML models, including core
workflow descriptions and variability, in order to make precise the relationship between
the constituent parts of StPowla. We apply the StPowla approach to an industrial case
study, provided by an industrial partner.
History
Supervisor(s)
Reiff-Marganiec, StephanDate of award
2011-10-01Awarding institution
University of LeicesterQualification level
- Doctoral
Qualification name
- PhD