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Protocols for processes: programming in the large for open systems (extended abstract)

Published: 23 October 2004 Publication History

Abstract

The modeling and enactment of business processes is being recognized as key to modern information management. The expansion of Web services has increased the attention given to processes, because processes are how services are composed and put to good use. However, current approaches are inadequate for flexibly modeling and enacting processes. These approaches take a logically centralized view of processes, treating a process as an implementation of a composed service. They provide low-level scripting languages to specify how a service may be implemented, rather than what interactions are expected from it. Consequently, existing approaches fail to adequately accommodate the essential properties of the business partners in a process (the partners would be realized via services)---their <i>autonomy</i> (freedom of action), <i>heterogeneity</i> (freedom of design), and <i>dynamism</i> (freedom of configuration).
Flexibly represented <i>protocols</i> can provide a more natural basis for specifying processes. Protocols specify <i>what</i> rather than <i>how</i>; thus they naturally maximize the autonomy, heterogeneity, and dynamism of the interacting parties. We are developing an approach for modeling and enacting business processes based on protocols. This paper describes some elements of (1) a conceptual model of processes that will incorporate abstractions based on protocols, roles, and commitments; (2) the semantics or mathematical foundations underlying the conceptual model and mapping global views of processes to the local actions of the parties involved; (3) methodologies involving rule-based reasoning to specify processes in terms of compositions of protocols.

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Cited By

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  • (2012)Innovation in Business Processes: Pattern-Driven Process ModellingInformation Systems: Crossroads for Organization, Management, Accounting and Engineering10.1007/978-3-7908-2789-7_26(229-237)Online publication date: 20-Mar-2012
  • (2006)Service MosaicIEEE Internet Computing10.1109/MIC.2006.8710:4(55-63)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2006
  • (2005)OWL-PProceedings of the fourth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems10.1145/1082473.1082822(139-140)Online publication date: 25-Jul-2005
  • Show More Cited By

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cover image ACM Conferences
OOPSLA '04: Companion to the 19th annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications
October 2004
348 pages
ISBN:1581138334
DOI:10.1145/1028664
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 23 October 2004

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Author Tags

  1. business processes
  2. interaction protocols
  3. open systems

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Cited By

View all
  • (2012)Innovation in Business Processes: Pattern-Driven Process ModellingInformation Systems: Crossroads for Organization, Management, Accounting and Engineering10.1007/978-3-7908-2789-7_26(229-237)Online publication date: 20-Mar-2012
  • (2006)Service MosaicIEEE Internet Computing10.1109/MIC.2006.8710:4(55-63)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2006
  • (2005)OWL-PProceedings of the fourth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems10.1145/1082473.1082822(139-140)Online publication date: 25-Jul-2005
  • (2005)Incorporating commitment protocols into troposProceedings of the 6th international conference on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering10.1007/11752660_6(69-80)Online publication date: 25-Jul-2005
  • (2004)A semantic approach for designing commitment protocolsProceedings of the 2004 international conference on Agent Communication10.1007/978-3-540-32258-0_3(33-49)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2004

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