Business process analysis and integration are key endeavours for today's enterprises. Recently, Web services have been widely adopted for the implementation and integration of business processes within and across enterprises. In this dissertation, we investigate the problem of enabling the analysis of service interactions, in today's enterprises, in the context of business process executions, and that of service integration. Our study shows that only fraction of interactions in the enterprise are supported by process-aware systems. However, enabling above-mentioned analyses requires: (i) a model of the underlying business process to be used as a reference for the analysis, and (ii) the ability to correlate events generated during service interactions into process instances. We refer to a process model and the corresponding process instances as a "process view". We propose the concept of process space to refer to all process related information sources in the enterprise, over which various process views are defined. We propose the design and development of a system called "process space discovery system" (PSDS) for discovering process views in a process space. We introduce novel approaches for the correlation of events into process instances, focusing on the public processes of Web services (business protocols), and also for the discovery of the business protocol models from the process instances of a process view. Analysis of service integration approaches shows that while standardisation in Web services simplifies the integration in the communication level, at the higher levels of abstractions (e.g., services interfaces and protocol models) services are still open to heterogeneities. We characterise the mismatches between service interfaces and protocol specifications and introduce "mismatch patterns" to represent them. A mismatch pattern also includes an adapter template that aims at the resolution of the captured mismatch. We also propose semi-automated approaches for identifying the mismatches between interface and protocol specifications of two services. The proposed approaches have been implemented in prototype tools, and experimentally validated on synthetic and real-world datasets. The discovered process views, using PSDS, can be used to perform various analyses in an enterprise, and the proposed adaptation approach facilitates the adoption of Web services in business process integration.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/257670 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | Motahari Nezhad, Hamid Reza, Computer Science & Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, UNSW |
| Publisher | Publisher:University of New South Wales. Computer Science & Engineering |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright, http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright |
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