Management of interactive business processes in decentralized service infrastructures through event processing

Abstract

Several independent service providers often form decentralized service infrastructures. However, efficient management and collaboration is impossible, if the execution engines are not properly connected. The decentralized approach requires an infrastructure that connects the engines and additionally provides management access to the infrastructure and processes executed. When business processes are executed using multiple process execution engines, monitoring and management of these processes become impossible using standard tools. Therefore, management by an organization providing a common platform integrating the different service providers is required. In this paper, we present an approach and an implementation of such a service platform, using a complex event processing (CEP) engine to integrate different process execution engines and other applications. In such a setting, it becomes even irrelevant if process execution is based on the Web Service Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) or the executable Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). As being able to interact with such processes and running services is crucial in such an infrastructure, we provide a concept for creating ad-hoc user interactions on a monitoring dashboard, which allows platform managers as well as stakeholders in the processes to interact with the platform and the processes executed – independent of their execution context.