Towards a Flexible Service Integration through Separation of Business Rules

Abstract

Driven by dynamic market demands, enterprises are continuously exploring collaborations with others to add value to their services and seize new market opportunities. Achieving enterprise collaboration is facilitated by Enterprise Application Integration and Business-to-Business approaches that employ architectural paradigms like Service Oriented Architecture and incorporate technological advancements in networking and computing. However, flexibility remains a major challenge related to enterprise collaboration. How can changes in demands and opportunities be reflected in collaboration solutions with minimum time and effort and with maximum reuse of existing applications? This paper proposes an approach towards a more flexible integration of enterprise applications in the context of service mediation. We achieve this by combining goal-based, model-driven and serviceoriented approaches. In particular, we pay special attention to the separation of business rules from the business process of the integration solution. Specifying the requirements as goal models, we separate those parts which are more likely to evolve over time in terms of business rules. These business rules are then made executable by exposing them as Web services and incorporating them into the design of the business process. Thus, should the business rules change, the business process remains unaffected. Finally, this paper also provides an evaluation of the flexibility of our solution in relation to the current work in business process flexibility research.

A cloud‐based integration platform for enterprise application integration: A Model‐Driven Engineering approach

“…At the end, 15 articles were left and then grouped by year, as shown in Table 2. Asunción et al 33 worked on a proposal to increase flexibility and to develop integration solutions based on service mediation. Their proposal was inspired by the Model-Driven Engineering and attempts to separate business rules from business processes supported by integration solutions.…”

Business Logic Evaluation Model Using Dependency Analysis Approach for Ser-Vice Integration

“…Source control management system in the model facilitates enterprises to carve up the resources as stated by the SLA. Asuncion et al (2010) have proposed a model for the separation of business rules from the business process of the integration solution. In an effort to bridge the gap between small and big companies, a Web Service-enabled B2B integration approach for SMEs has been developed by (Yan et al, 2008).…”

Towards Pragmatic Interoperability in the New Enterprise — A Survey of Approaches

“…As the approach leverages model-driven techniques, a key benefit is abstraction; i.e., with the same abstract solution depicted as platform-independent models, new implementations can be automatically generated, allowing adaptiveness. Furthermore, there is also work that extends the approach whereby business rules are used to separate the dynamic aspects of the requirements making the approach even more flexible [1]. We position the approach as having a business level scope.…”