WS-BPEL Business Process Abstraction and Concretisation

Business process management is tightly coupled with serviceoriented architecture, as business processes orchestrate services for business collaboration at logical level. Given the complexity of business processes and the variety of users, it is a sought-after feature to show a business process with different views, so as to cater for the diverse interests, authority levels, etc., of users. This paper presents a framework named FlexView to support process abstraction and concretisation. A novel model is proposed to characterise the structural components of a business process and describe the relations between these components. Two algorithms are developed to formally illustrate the realisation of process abstraction and concretisation in compliance with the defined consistency rules. A prototype is also implemented with WS-BPEL to prove the applicability of the approach.