View-based and Model-driven Approach for Reducing the Development Complexity in Process-Driven SOA

Abstract

In process-driven, service-oriented architectures (SOA), process activities invoke services to perform the various tasks of the process. As the number of elements involved in a business process architecture, such as processes, process activities, and services, grows, the complexity of process development also increases along with the number of the elements’ relationships, interactions, and data exchanges – and quickly becomes hardly manageable. In addition, process-driven SOA models address different stakeholders, such as business experts and technical experts, who require different kinds of information for their work. Finally, process-driven SOA models must deal with constant changes – both at the business level (e.g. business concept changes) and the technical level (e.g. technologies and platform changes). Separation of concerns is a promising approach to manage such development complexity. In this paper, we propose a view-based, model-driven approach with three major contributions: firstly, it captures different perspectives of a business process model in separate, (semi-)formalized views; secondly, it separates different abstraction levels in a business process architecture; thirdly, an extensible model-driven approach to integrate the different view models and abstraction levels is presented. Our approach is beneficial not only in reducing the process development complexity, but also in coping with dynamic changes at all abstraction levels.