Willem-Jan van den Heuvel

Service-oriented design and development methodology

Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) are rapidly emerging as the premier integration and architectural approach in contemporary, complex, heterogeneous computing environments. SOA is not simply about deploying software: it also requires that organisations evaluate their business models, come up with service-oriented analysis and design techniques, deployment and support plans, and carefully evaluate partner/customer/supplier relationships. Since SOA is based on open standards and is frequently realised using Web Services (WS), developing meaningful WS and business process specifications is an important requirement for SOA applications that leverage WS. Designers and developers cannot be expected to oversee a complex service-oriented development project without relying on a sound design and development methodology. This paper provides an overview of the methods and techniques used in service-oriented design and development. The aim of this paper is to examine a service development methodology from the point of view of both service producers and requesters and review the range of elements in this methodology that are available to them.

Enterprise application integration and complex adaptive systems

Could system integration and cooperation be improved with agentified enterprise components?

Cross-organizational workflow integration using contracts

Enterprises are lining up into virtual enterprises to meet the ever-increasing customers demands in a more flexible and effective way than before. Hence, the business processes as well as supporting workflow systems need to be tightly embedded into streamlined, virtual value chains that can transcend organizational boundaries. It is generally recognized that the combination of workflow with business-object component technology provides the required solution. However, todays widespread business workflow modeling techniques suffer from an object bias, ignoring the most essential coordination vehicle in the enterprise: communication, and the resulting commitments. In this paper, we present contracts that encapsulate (formal) commitments laid down as a set of obligations to coordinate and control the interaction between business workflows. We use the business contract specification language XLBC to formally link the Component Definition Language (CDL) specification of business object-based workflow systems. XLBC is an extension of the Formal Language for Business Communication (FLBC) and a framework for the semantics of XLBC transactions is described. Finally, we indicate a feasible implementation architecture on the basis of an emerging internet-enabled business process architecture, ebXML and Trading Partner Agreements (TPAs).

Business process development life cycle methodology

An innovative roadmap brings together the worlds of business processes and Web services, harnessing their power to construct industrial-strength business applications.

Root-cause analysis of design-time compliance violations on the basis of property patterns

Today’s business environment demands a high degree of compliance of business processes with business rules, policies, regulations and laws. Compliance regulations, such Sarbanes-Oxley force enterprises to continuously review their business processes and service-enabled applications and ensure that they satisfy the set of relevant compliance constraints. Compliance management should be considered from the very early stages of the business process design. In this paper, a taxonomy of compliance constraints for business processes is introduced based on property specification patterns, where patterns can be used to facilitate the formal specification of compliance constraints. This taxonomy serves as the backbone of the root-cause analysis, which is conducted to reason about and eventually resolve design-time compliance violations. Based on the root-cause analysis, appropriate guidelines and instructions can be provided as remedies to alleviate design-time compliance deviations in service-enabled business processes.

Business process compliance through reusable units of compliant processes

Compliance management is essential for ensuring that organizational business processes and supporting information systems are in accordance with a set of prescribed requirements originating from laws, regulations, and various legislative or technical documents such as Sarbanes-Oxley Act or ISO 17799. As the violation of such requirements may lead to significant punishment for an organization, compliance management should be supported at the very early stages of business process development. In this paper, we present an integrated approach to compliance management that helps process designers to adhere to compliance requirements relevant for their processes. Firstly, we introduce a conceptual model for specifying compliance requirements originating from various compliance sources. Secondly, we propose a framework for augmenting business processes with reusable fragments to ensure process compliance to certain requirements by design. Furthermore, we discuss the formalization of compliance requirements using mathematical logics and integrate the framework for process reuse with automated software verification tools.

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.

Formalizing and appling compliance patterns for business process compliance

Today’s enterprises demand a high degree of compliance of business processes to meet diverse regulations and legislations. Several industrial studies have shown that compliance management is a daunting task, and organizations are still struggling and spending billions of dollars annually to ensure and prove their compliance. In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive compliance management framework with a main focus on design-time compliance management as a first step towards a preventive lifetime compliance support. The framework enables the automation of compliance-related activities that are amenable to automation, and therefore can significantly reduce the expenditures spent on compliance. It can help experts to carry out their work more efficiently, cut the time spent on tedious manual activities, and reduce potential human errors. An evident candidate compliance activity for automation is the compliance checking, which can be achieved by utilizing formal reasoning and verification techniques. However, formal languages are well known of their complexity as only versed users in mathematical theories and formal logics are able to use and understand them. However, this is generally not the case with business and compliance practitioners. Therefore, in the heart of the compliance management framework, we introduce the Compliance Request Language (CRL), which is formally grounded on temporal logic and enables the abstract pattern-based specification of compliance requirements. CRL constitutes a series of compliance patterns that spans three structural facets of business processes; control flow, employed resources and temporal perspectives. Furthermore, CRL supports the specification of compensations and non-monotonic requirements, which permit the relaxation of some compliance requirements to handle exceptional situations. An integrated tool suite has been developed as an instantiation artefact, and the validation of the approach is undertaken in several directions, which includes internal validity, controlled experiments, and functional testing.

Capturing Compliance Requirements: A Pattern-Based Approach

In todays IT-centric business environment, managing compliance with regulations, laws, and other imperatives has become critical for success. Directives govern almost every aspect of running a business, requiring organizations to provide assurances to regulators, stakeholders, customers, and business partners. Assuring compliance across an enterprise necessitates a holistic, tractable, and disciplined approach for defining an integrated, consistent set of process and system-level internal controls. A new pattern-based framework captures and manages business process compliance requirements by acting as a springboard to fully automate and continuously audit business processes.

Service Representation, Discovery, and Composition for E-marketplaces

Although network-centric technologies will make the diverse services easily accessible via the Web, the discovery of the right service with the right capabilities and the development of E-commerce service based application and networked services which share existing e-services is still an ad-hoc, very demanding, and time consuming task. In this paper we propose a framework for e-services description and steps for service discovery and combination. Several algorithms for service discovery are proposed, which provide a foundation for service combination in an e-marketplace.