Business Process Modeling of the Pesticide Life Cycle: a service-oriented approach
J. Wolfert, D. Matocha, C.M. Verloop, A.J.M. Beulens · Socio-Environmental Systems Modeling · 2009
Agri-food companies increasingly participate as networked enterprises in multi-dimensional, dynamic and knowledge-based networks.Information sharing increasingly becomes an important factor.Business processes should therefore be leading in designing and using of information systems.Flexible, standardized components, which allow setting up and quickly changing running business processes, are needed.A combined approach of Business Process Management (BPM) and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is considered to be a very suitable to meet these requirements.This paper describes how BPM and SOA can be used for information modelling of farm management using the pesticide life cycle as a case study.Decisions on pesticide use are constrained by legal restrictions, social requirements and market conditions.Briefly, the basic principles of BPM and SOA are explained.This is applied to farm management and the pesticide life cycle in a series of aggregated models, using the formal business process modelling notation (BPMN).These models form the basis for further implementation of information systems.It is concluded that by using BPM and SOA, it is possible to make a model of the pesticide life cycle in farm management, covering the complete range of business processes in the chain.The models illustrate the use of standardized components that can be re-used in other contexts.Later on, they can be used as basis for setting up a complete architecture for total farm management.This should be further verified in other case studies and implementation of the model into real information systems based on web services.