Saida Boukhedouma

Adaptation patterns for service based inter-organizational workflows

The SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) paradigm provides important advantages like interoperability, reusability and flexibility required in the area of business applications. In our research works, we focus on the use of SOA to implement inter-organizational workflows (IOWF). Our goal is to obtain IOWF models flexible enough in order to ease their adaptation at build-time and at runtime, because services are loosely coupled components, easily invoked and interoperable. This paper focuses on specific and well common IOWF-architectures defined in the literature; it deals with adaptation of IOWF process models obeying to these architectures. First, we define the concept of Service-Based Cooperation Pattern (SBCP) that supports service-based IOWF models meeting one of the specific architectures considered. Then, we state a set of recurrent operations of adaptation (attached to process and interaction aspects) that can be applied on service-based IOWF models, and we illustrate their implementation for IOWF models specified with BPEL.

Adaptability of Service Based Workflow Models: The “Chained Execution” Architecture

Business processes are frequently subject to changes which must be supported by process models and systems implementing them. This paper deals with adaptability of Inter-Organizational Workflow (IOWF) process models based on services. It states conceptually, typical adaptations that can be operated on IOWF models obeying to the chained execution architecture. IOWF models are described through the concepts of service and orchestration function expressed using basic control flow operators. Thus, operations of adaptation turn to modification of services and transformation of orchestration functions describing the model. We particularly distinguish evolvable adaptation leading to expansion of the cooperation and/or the global functionality of the process.

Interconnecting Workflows Using Services: An Approach for "Case Transfer" with Centralized Control

In this paper, we are interested in structured cooperation based on workflow (WF). The current work proposes an approach based on services for WF interconnection particularly obeying to the “case transfer” architecture. This late defines a form of cooperation in Inter-Organizational WF involving a range of partners with common business goals, exercising the same business. All partners share the same WF model implemented at each location and a transfer policy to manage transfer for process instances from one partner to another. By the use of services, our goal is to obtain IOWF models flexible enough so they remain easily adaptable to support process changes. The proposed approach is based on centralized control for transfers.

A pattern-based approach for workflow interconnection and flexibility support

This paper describes a new approach for interconnection and flexibility support of service-based workflow processes. We consider specific architectures of inter-organisational workflows IOWF fairly widespread in the B2B area defining different cooperation schemas; our final objective is to deal with flexibility of IOWF models obeying to these schemas. First, by introducing a new concept called service-based cooperation pattern SBCP, we define new generic IOWF-architectures using the SOA paradigm to support process models flexible enough for easing their adaptation, evolution and reuse. A SBCP is defined through three main dimensions: the distribution of services among the partners sites, the control of instance execution and the structure of interaction between services. Furthermore, to support changes affecting the IOWF models, we define three categories of adaptation patterns according to the three dimensions defining a SBCP; we also exhibit aspects of evolution and reuse of IOWF models using generalised and composite cooperation patterns.

Flexible Loosely Coupled inter-organizational workflows using SOA

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.

Evolution of inter-organizational workflows: The case-transfer pattern

This paper deals with evolution of inter-organizational workflow (IOWF) models. Here, we consider process models obeying to the “Case-transfer” cooperation pattern. Our aim is to identify evolution aspects of these process models and to provide mechanisms for evolution support at different levels for the IOWF process definition. First, we conceptualize the Case-transfer model using the SOA paradigm which gives additional degree of flexibility to the IOWF processes, thanks to the main characteristics of services. Then, we discuss the differents aspects of evolution and we show the feasability of our approach by describing our evolution framework.