From inter-organizational business process models to service-oriented architecture models

Abstract

Today’s business processes become increasingly complex and often cross the boundaries of the organizations. On the one hand, to support their business processes, modern organizations use enterprise information systems that need to be aware of the organizations’ processes and contexts. Such systems are called Process-Aware Information System (PAIS). On the other hand, the service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a fast emerging architectural style that has been widely adopted by modern organizations to design and implement PAIS that support their business processes. This paper aims to bridge the gap between inter-organizational business processes and SOA-based PAISs that support them. It proposes a novel model-driven design method that generates SOA models expressed in SoaML taking the specification of collaborative business processes expressed in BPMN as input. We present the principles underlying the approach, the state of an ongoing implementation, and the results of two studies conducted to empirically validate the method in the context of ERP key processes.