A Service-based Framework for Flexible Business Processes

Abstract

A framework for the design and enactment of flexible and adaptive business processes combines design-time and runtime mechanisms to offer a single integrated solution. The design-time environment supports the specification of process-driven Web applications with quality-of-service (QoS) constraints and monitoring annotations. The runtime identifies the actual services, from the QoS perspective, oversees the execution through monitoring, and reacts to failures and infringement of QoS constraints. This article discusses these issues on a proof-of-concept application developed for an industrial supply-chain scenario.