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

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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.

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Notes

  1. Business semantic describes the business information from the business perspective that is understandable by both the business and IT [18].

  2. However, for every open question, the experts could use these to clarify their answer, regardless of the answers to the associated bi-valuated question.

  3. The material is available for download at: https://goo.gl/vsX4Yg.

  4. From REA point of view, a Claim occurs when increment and decrement events in exchange processes do not occur simultaneously. This temporary imbalance results in a claim between economic agents.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank all the experts for their involvement in this research. This research was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) (RGPIN-2018-05465).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. LATECE Laboratory, University of Quebec at Montreal, Montreal, Canada

    Redouane Blal, Abderrahmane Leshob, Javier Gonzalez-Huerta & Hafedh Mili

  2. UQAM School of Management (ESG UQAM), Montreal, Canada

    Redouane Blal & Abderrahmane Leshob

  3. Software Engineering Research Lab Sweden, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Karlskrona, Sweden

    Javier Gonzalez-Huerta

  4. École de Technologie Supérieure, Montreal, Canada

    Anis Boubaker

Authors
  1. Redouane Blal
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  2. Abderrahmane Leshob
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  3. Javier Gonzalez-Huerta
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  4. Hafedh Mili
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  5. Anis Boubaker
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Correspondence to Abderrahmane Leshob.

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Blal, R., Leshob, A., Gonzalez-Huerta, J. et al. From inter-organizational business process models to service-oriented architecture models. SOCA 12, 227–245 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11761-018-0246-0

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