Web Services-Enhanced Agile Modeling and Integrating Business Processes
Fatima-Zahra Belouadha, Hajar Omrana, Ounsa Roudis · InTech eBooks · 2012
Applications and Global Acceptance 74 necessary to integrate them in order to achieve a given business goal.However, in an evolving collaborative context, this integration should be dynamic and easy to make the enterprise's information system agile.To achieve this goal in the global economic context, we think that the e-business mechanisms have to provide the means to quickly and easily discover the appropriate business processes through Internet.In this chapter, we propose a model-driven approach, based on Web services standards, for modeling and integrating agile business processes using Web services.The choice of focusing on Web services technology was not arbitrary.The large and broad adoption of this technology by enterprises will lead most business processes to be performed using Web services.Besides, the added value of Web services and their great interest to business process management are beyond doubt.Web services produce, on the one hand, loosely coupled applicative components.On the other hand, they are the most widely used implementation technology of SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture), which is based on the large experiences of software and distributed component technologies.Being founded on the XML (eXtensible Markup Language) language, the SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) protocol and the UDDI (Universal Description Discovery and Integration) repository, this technology can be considered as an appropriate mean to ensure interoperability, data exchange and the publication and discovery of business processes when they can be implemented as Web services.Furthermore, Web services standards developed by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) consortium fit well with required standards in e-business context (Belouadha & Roudiès, 2008), and therefore they can be used in case of business processes.Our approach aims to benefit from Web services characteristics for managing business processes.The purpose is to enable the production of agile business processes through an enhanced modeling and dynamic integration.Therefore, we propose to describe them from a business point of view.We consider that a process is a set of activities that can be mapped to Web services.Thereby, a business process can be implemented by composing a set of published Web services.Besides, agility can be achieved by the ability of updating a given process through reuse of Web services dynamically discovered from Internet.A rich Web services' repository available in the Web as well as the high interoperability of Web services facilitate integration.This chapter is structured in seven sections.Section 2 introduces the concept of business process.Sections 3 and 4 are respectively devoted to the description of modeling languages and integration solutions used to design and integrate business processes.Section 5 presents the proposed approach and illustrates it by a sample scenario.Section 6 explores future research opportunities to build on this work.Finally, Section 7 discusses our contribution by comparing it with related works, and specifies its impact, advantages and also limitations. How to referenceIn order to correctly reference this scholarly work, feel free to copy and paste the following: Fatima-Zahra Belouadha, Hajar Omrana and Ounsa Roudiès (2012).