Abstract. Service Oriented Architecture is a promising architectural approach to solve the integration problem originated by business process integration and automation requirements. Defining the appropriate granularity and scope of services is a critical issue to allow their reuse. Architecture abstractions, such as patterns, are a medium to capture design knowledge and to allow the reuse of successful previous designs. The continual rise of abstraction in software engineering approaches have been a central driver of this work, placing the notion of patterns at business model level. In this paper we propose a set of pattern-based techniques to define the scope and granularity of services based on identified patterns in business process models. Graph-based pattern matching and pattern discovery are proposed to recommend the scope and granularity of services on process-centric description models. Matching of generalised patterns and hierarchical matching are discussed.

Designing the adequate scope and granularity of services is critical for their effective reuse. Patterns at business process level are abstractions of common and reusable designs to operate businesses. Business Process (BP) patterns can capture expert process design knowledge and greatly benefit the design of new enterprise services by guiding the definition of their scope and granularity. Identifying pattern instances in real and large documented business processes is a challenging task, requiring the analysis of the structure, semantics and behaviour associated to process descriptions. In this paper 1 we present a solution to identify BP patterns based on a graph matching mechanism. Structural and semantics aspects, including natural language processing, are addressed. The approach moves one step further to increase automation during the design of process-centric enterprise services. We demonstrate the approach, discuss its limitations, novelty and practical benefits by using a case study based on the National Revenue Agency case at SOPOSE08.

With software services becoming a strategic capability for the software sector, service engineering needs to address integration problems based on support that helps services to collaborate and coordinate their activities. The increasing need to address dynamic and automated changes-caused by on-demand environments and changing requirements-shall be answered through a service coordination architecture based on event-based collaboration. The solution is based on a service coordination space architecture that acts as a passive infrastructure for event-based collaboration. We discuss the information architecture and the coordination principles of such a collaboration environment.

Abstract. E-business involves the implementation of business processes over the Web. At a technical level, this imposes an application integration problem. In a wider sense, the integration of software and business levels across organisations becomes a significant challenge. Service architectures are an increasingly adopted architectural approach for solving Enterprise Applications Integration (EAI). The adoption of this new architectural paradigm requires adaptation or creation of novel methodologies and techniques to solve the integration problem. In this paper we present the pattern-based techniques supporting a methodological framework to design service architectures for EAI. The techniques are used for services identification, for transformation from business models to service architectures and for architecture modifications.

Context: Processes are central to the operation of many systems or organizations. Process-centric systems, ranging from enterprise workflow systems to open distributed service compositions, have significantly increased in number and complexity. Objective: Designers of process-centric systems can benefit from process abstractions (including patterns) capturing and allowing the reuse of designs for frequent operational problems. Existing process patterns detection techniques have efficiency problems and difficulties to identify partial and inexact pattern instances. Method: We propose a process pattern detection technique based on a family of subgraph matching algorithms. The algorithms implement surjective graph morphism detection and a mechanism to incorporate semantic similarity computation for types and attributes of process graph elements. Results: Efficiency is addressed using simplified data structures, reducing the search space and its exploration. Match accuracy and time-complexity are demonstrated in an experimental study. Conclusions: Using process patterns allows business and technical processes to be provided as sharable service resources. Patterns can help to manage processes as configurable resources where a pattern can define a family of concrete customizable processes.