A business process aware semantic QoS provisioning scheme

Abstract

The execution of business processes is supported by running many applications within a corporate network. Each business process includes several tasks which have different priorities expressing each task's relevance in helping to achieve the related business objectives. The provisioning of a certain level of QoS according to the requirements of an entire business process can hardly be accomplished using existing QoS provisioning schemes because these do not account for the dynamic requirements introduced by business processes. The definition of a certain level of QoS using the existing models is just driven by technical aspects of the running applications. In this paper we present a novel business process aware semantic QoS provisioning scheme that accounts for the dynamic requirements and permits application-independent usage. In the business world the priority of a task depends on the current context it is executed in. So equal tasks may need different conditions of QoS in different situations, which can be characterized by the tasks that ran before or run in parallel. Therefore, the semantic behavior is based on the entire business processes as input for the QoS provisioning process. With the proposed QoS provisioning scheme a fair application conditioning can be achieved that is much closer to the business requirements on QoS. For the validation of the scheme, it has been implemented as a QoS-driver in different operating systems.