Dynamic product line for business process management based on services

Abstract

The current complexity existing in the corporative world has required from the IT infrastructures great dynamism to provide technical solutions for conducting business. To achieve their goals, organizations need to use efficient techniques of Business Process Management, which can be facilitated by the Service-oriented Computing - especially by the Web services. Process management needs to provide dynamism and flexibility to organizations, so that they become competitive in their field of work. However, some challenges must be addressed for these technologies fulfill completely their role in providing the desired computing environment for organizations. An important requirement is to enable reuse in different stages of the process management, as well as in different types of artifacts manipulated during its application. Moreover, it is important that software development techniques are adapted to support the development of new IT solutions based on process management and service-orientation. The objective of this research project is to provide a complete Product Line for the dynamic management of business processes based on Web services, focusing on electronic contract templates involving the cooperative organizations. Product Line is a software engineering approach whose goal is the systematic reuse in the development of systems, which can be adapted to the Business Processes Management. A major challenge in this project is to create a Product Line with dynamic aspects, usually not necessary in conventional software development.The current complexity existing in the corporative world has required from the IT infrastructures great dynamism to provide technical solutions for conducting business. To achieve their goals, organizations need to use efficient techniques of Business Process Management, which can be facilitated by the Service-oriented Computing - especially by the Web services. Process management needs to provide dynamism and flexibility to organizations, so that they become competitive in their field of work. However, some challenges must be addressed for these technologies fulfill completely their role in providing the desired computing environment for organizations. An important requirement is to enable reuse in different stages of the process management, as well as in different types of artifacts manipulated during its application. Moreover, it is important that software development techniques are adapted to support the development of new IT solutions based on process management and service-orientation. The objective of this research project is to provide a complete Product Line for the dynamic management of business processes based on Web services, focusing on electronic contract templates involving the cooperative organizations. Product Line is a software engineering approach whose goal is the systematic reuse in the development of systems, which can be adapted to the Business Processes Management. A major challenge in this project is to create a Product Line with dynamic aspects, usually not necessary in conventional software development. (AU)