Michele Mancioppi

An Architecture for Managing the Lifecycle of Business Goals for Partners in a Service Network

Networks of interdependent organizations cooperate to produce goods or, nowadays, services that are of value to their markets as well as to the participating organizations. Such co-operations can be supported by corresponding business processes which are based on SOA technology. Developing and managing SOA-based business processes in such service networks necessitates a comprehensive architecture which is on the one hand grounded on solid design principles, and on the other hand capturing best-practices and experiences. Such an architecture is currently lacking. This paper outlines a first attempt to develop and validate an architecture for developing, monitoring, measuring and optimizing SOA-enabled business processes in service networks. A case study from the telecommunications industry is analyzed, and different aspects of service networks are addressed.

Towards Classification Criteria for Process Fragmentation Techniques

Process fragmentation is the foundation of many state-of-the-art techniques for supporting management, reuse and change of process models. Such techniques vary greatly in terms of which types of processes they are applicable to, what they aim at accomplishing, how they define the resulting process fragments, etc. The comparison, analysis, reuse and selection of the available process fragmentation techniques are hindered by the lack of a common terminology and classification criteria, and by the large discrepancy in the characteristics that are covered when presenting novel fragmentation techniques. This work starts addressing this issue by investigating classification criteria for process fragmentation techniques based on the “seven Ws”, namely Why, What, When, Where, Who, Which, and hoW. The presented classification criteria are applied to some of the process fragmentation approaches available in the literature. In addition to enabling the classification of fragmentation techniques, the classification criteria here presented form a “check-list” for authors of future works in the field of process fragmentation.

Sound Multi-party Business Protocols for Service Networks

Service networks comprise large numbers of long-running, highly dynamic complex end-to-end service interactions reflecting asynchronous message flows that typically transcend several organizations and span several geographical locations. At the communication level, service network business protocols can be flexible ranging from conventional inter-organizational point-to-point service interactions to fully blown dynamic multi-party interactions of global reach within which each participant may contribute its activities and services. In this paper we introduce a formal framework enriched with temporal constraints to describe multi-party business protocols for service networks. We extend this framework with the notion of multi-party business protocol soundness and show how it is possible to execute a multi-party protocol consistently in a completely distributed manner while guaranteeing eventual termination.