A Platform-Independent Mechanism for Deployment of Business Processes Using Abstract Services

This paper deals with the problem of efficiently deploying business processes in service oriented environments with the purpose of enhancing operational agility and improving governance. Today's solutions rely on early coupling between the business process layer and the underlying service oriented architecture layer and this constrains evolution in either of the two layers to the ability of the other layer to adapt. The presented approach leverages abstract architectural mappings that indirectly connect business process activities with service-based assets. It consists of a deployment mechanism that is capable of taking these mappings and generating fully executable artifacts for a variety of runtime platforms. The deployment mechanism is encapsulated in a self-contained entity that is instantiated and executed each time a business process needs to be deployed. This entity contains all the necessary data for the deployment, while ensuring complete accountability of operations. This approach promotes late binding of processes to the underlying SOA and it has the potential to significantly increase the speed of implementing changes in business operations while ensuring long-term sustainability. In addition it promotes independent evolutions of processes and services while encouraging incremental convergence of the SOA towards the needs of the business domain.