Associating assertions with business processes and monitoring their execution

Abstract

Business processes that span organizational borders describe the interaction between multiple parties working towards a common objective. They also express business rules that govern the behavior of the process and account for express-ing changes reflecting new business objectives and new mar-ket situations. In our previous work we developed a service request lan-guage and support framework that allow users to formulate their requests against standard business processes. In this paper we extend this approach by presenting a framework capable of automatically associating business rules with rel-evant processes involved in a user request. This framework plans and monitors the execution of the request against ser-vices underlying these processes. Definitions and classifi-cations of business rules (named assertions in the paper) are given together with an assertion language for expressing them. The framework is able to handle the non-determinism typical for service-oriented computing environments and it is based on the interleaving of planning and execution.