Model-Driven Development of Adaptable Service-Oriented Business Processes

Businesses typically structure their activities with workflows, which are often implemented in a rather static fashion in their IT systems. Nowadays, system requirements change rapidly as businesses try to maintain their competitive edge, calling for similar agility of the IT systems. To this end, we present StPowla, an approach that marries service oriented architecture, policies and workflows to support the agile execution of business workflows. In StPowla, the business is modelled by workflows, whose tasks are eventually carried out by services. Adapatation is obtained by allowing the stakeholders to define policies that establish the quality levels required of the services. The prototype StPowla support architecture comprizes the transformation of the workflow model into executable WS–BPEL to be deployed in the ODE–BPEL execution engine, the generation of default policies from the model, and the enactment of the policies by the Appel policy server. The SENSORIA Finance Case Study is used throughout the paper.