Business process management in service-oriented computing (SOC) environments poses special challenges. In particular, SOC environments are dynamic, thereby requiring frequent changes in business processes. Current business process modeling approaches handle such changes in an ad hoc manner, and lack a principled means of determining what needs to be changed and where. This paper addresses process adaptability through a novel application of business protocols, especially of protocol composition, introduced in our previous work. Through a real business scenario of auto-insurance claim processing, this paper demonstrates how a wide range of adaptations can be handled naturally and systematically via protocol composition. The illustrated adaptations have been evaluated via a prototype.
Environments in which Web service compositions (WSC)operate are often dynamic. We address the problem of which service to query for up-to-date information in order to adapt a hierarchical WSC, given that queries are not free. Previously,the value of changed information (VOC) has been proposed to select those services for querying whose revised non-functional information is expected to bring about the most change in the composition. In this paper, we present an approach for utilizing VOC in the context of a WSC composed of services and lower level WSCs, which induces a natural hierarchy over the composition.
Since the end of the Cold War, the study of European defence has been dominated by a ‘Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP)-centric’ approach, while largely neglecting the comparative analysis ...