Semantic Description of Distributed Business Processes

摘要

Today, more and more business processes are distributed in nature, involving business processes of other organizations that are exposed as services. Since a business process can be very complex in general, there is a need for automated support for checking whether a business process complies to organization's policies. On the other hand, the fast growing market of services and the need for continuously improving the business processes to cope with the competition, automated methods are required to find appropriate services and compose business processes. Fulfilling these requirements is a challenging task needing formalisms for describing business processes and services, specifying organization's policies and algorithms for discovery of services as well as verification and composition of business processes. In this paper, we present formalisms for describing executable distributed business processes and for describing functional and non-functional properties of services. The novelty of the formalism for describing distributed business processes lies in the combination of the polyadic 7r-calculus and the description logic SHOTN(T>) with DL-Safe rules. When the functionality of business processes are exposed as services, the quality of service attributes and access control policies need to be described in addition to the functional properties. For this purpose, we introduce semantic-SPKI/SDSI certificates and credential based access control. Hence, our formalism allows modeling of dynamic behavior including credential based access control along with the involved resources (information or real world objects) and quality attributes of business processes in a unifying way.