End-to-End Solution for Business Process Composition and Management (BP-Com)


Project funded by National Technology Fund, Ministry of Information Technology

Project Brief

The project aims at improving efficiency and reducing cost for development, deployment, and management of business processes (BPs) for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Specifically, the objective is to utilize the cloud-based services and resources for rapid development and deployment of BPs for SME organizations that cannot bear with the high cost of personnel and software/hardware resources for coding, administration, and hosting of their business processes.

Figure 1. BP-Com Architecture.

A BP is a set of logically related activities performed to achieve a well-defined business outcome. Examples of BP include online/Internet order processing, payroll management process, inventory management process, Tax return filing process. In many industries such as supply chain management, online retail, e-commerce, BPs may consist of complex interactions among a large set of distributed services provided by different organizations who may not be geographically collocated. For developing, managing, and hosting such BPs, organizations need to put significant investment in the IT infrastructure and personnel. Organizations in the SME sector are typically resource constrained and may not have the expertise and software/hardware resources to support the non-core elements in their BPs (e.g., payment processing, invoicing and billing, accounting, etc.).

The emerging cloud infrastructure and service-oriented middleware can be leveraged for development, administration, and hosting of the BPs of organizations in the SME sector. An organization does not need to rely on its own resources for software coding and computing infrastructure for development and composition of its BP. Rather the individual activities of the BP can be performed by invoking the Web services offered by third parties. Especially in the e-commerce and financial domains, there are numerous third-party Web services covering every major functional aspect such as invoicing and billing, taxation and costing, accounting, payment processing, shipment, and so on. Similarly, other cloud resources (e.g., servers, compute nodes, storage, etc.) can be utilized for hosting and administration of BPs.

We propose to develop an end-to-end solution called Business Process Composition and Management System (BP-Com) that enables SME sector organizations to compose, refine, deploy, and execute their business processes using the Web services and resources available in the public cloud. BP-Com will provide a collaborative environment in which organizations share their requirements for new processes and/or details of their existing processes in a privacy-preserving manner to enable collaborative composition of business processes. In addition we plan to develop prototype of the proposed BP-Com system so that other SMEs can replicate similar systems for offering BP composition and management services.

Research Objectives and Expected Results

The overall research objective is to develop an end-to-end solution for BP composition and management for the SME sector using cloud-based resources. Below are the specific research tasks related to development of this end-to-end solution.

  1. Develop a BP data repository that enables organizations to utilize a common set of anonymized BPs in a privacy-preserving manner.
  2. Develop a formal model for any organization to specify its requirements for BP composition and management.
  3. Develop BP workflow model based on the BP composition requirements given by an organization and the BP data stored in the repository.
  4. Generate executable BP code from the BP workflow model, internal services/operations, and external Web services available in the cloud.
  5. Develop capability for self-monitoring and dynamic adaptation of BP instances due to service failures, unavailability, or other user-generated events. This dynamic adaptation needs to take into account the security requirements of both service requestor and service providers.
  6. Develop an integrated prototype of the BP-Com system.

Academic Objectives and Expected Results

  1. Engage graduate (MS and PhD) students in the proposed research for their dissertation.
  2. Incorporate the research findings of this project into relevant graduate courses (e.g., Distributed Systems course, service-oriented computing, software engineering courses).