SoD-TEAM: Tools and Techniques for On-the-Fly Design of Business Process Integration

University Of California-Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara CA

Investigators

Abstract

Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Division Computer and Network Systems (CNS) Science of Design (SoD) Program Proposal Number: 0613998 P/I: Su, Jianwen PI's Department: Computer Science Institution: University of California - Santa Barbara Award: $ 200,000 Title: "SoD-TEAM: Tools and Techniques for On-the-fly Design of Business Process Integration" The focus of this project is on developing a formal framework and collection of tools that aid in the design (or re-design) and management of business processes and business process integration (BPI) - that is, processes and people that are within and between enterprises. Within the software engineering domain, the goal is to reduce development times and produce higher quality code in enterprise software that is continually evolving due to changing business needs and management initiatives. This project builds upon and compliments tools and technologies developed over the past decade such as: Services Oriented Architecture (SOA), Model Driven Architecture (MDA), and associated standards (primarily from the Extensible Markup Language (XML), web services, Unified Modeling Language (UML), and Object Management Group (OMG) communities). The SOA and MDA paradigms focus primarily on procedural representations of business processes and BPI environments. The premise of this research is that value can be added to BPI by developing a targeted declarative framework for specifying the properties of business processes and associated artifacts, including their possible behaviors and possible impacts on their environment. Two improvements that this declarative approach may produce are: (1) precision, because in many cases the procedural specifications, especially when at a higher level of abstraction, are ambiguous in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, and (2) flexibility, because it will afford many more kinds of incomplete specification than available from the procedural approaches. The foundation of the declarative framework for BPI is provided by the Process Specification Language (PSL), a first-order logic based ISO standard developed for specifying, analyzing, and integrating processes, initially introduced manufacturing. The domain of knowledge that supports this project is, to a large extent, the result of prior research by project team members including the design and development of PSL. All four research collaborators played a central role in the development of the Firstorder Logic Ontology for Web Services (FLOWS), which forms part of the Semantic Web Services Framework (SWSF). FLOWS is a formal extension of PSL, which explicitly incorporates and axiomatizes in a declarative framework the key building blocks of semantic web services. FLOWS (and PSL beneath it) provide a starting point for the development of a declarative framework for supporting BPI design. By targeting on the design and management of business processes with the service-oriented paradigm, this project may improve the efficiency and productivity of business process management and integration and lay a foundation for SOA research as a step towards service science. Program Manager: Anita J. La Salle Date: July 18, 2006