Supporting Differentiated Services With Configurable Business Processes

Abstract

In order to support business service flexible and reusable, it is desirable to provide users or applications the same service but with different service quality, dif- ferent interaction paths, or different outcomes. We call this design principle as Service Differentiation. In this paper we present a fully working service design method where variability is externalized as business policies so that the business process(es) does not need to be altered for any anticipated changes. Service differentiation is realized by configured business processes and interfaces, and the dynamic ’binding’ between user/application with a specific interface is determined by policy during service invocation time.