An Approach to Designing Service-Oriented Product-Line Architecture for Business Process Families

Abstract

Since the requirements of enterprises are complex and changeable, it is necessary to have solutions that are proactive and flexible. In a service-oriented architecture (SOA), because services are independent, loosely coupled, and reusable, they can be integrated flexibly. Business processes are generally built by integrating services. However, an enterprise must tackle the serious issues of the cost and time required for changing processes. Therefore, we apply a product-line technique to SOA. This allows us to generate various integrated services. The integrated services represent work processes of enterprises and they can be designed immediately as new requirements. Service-oriented product-line architecture (SOPLA) supports the design and management of business process families. This paper demonstrates the method of designing SOPLA and the manner in which SOPLA can be used to produce business process families.