Towards a Service-Oriented Mda-Based Approach to the Alignment of Business Processes With It Systems: From the Business Model to a Web Service Composition Model

Abstract

In recent years, the automation of business processes has become one of the most prominent and promising uses of Web service technology. Consequently several languages have been created for the execution of business processes, making it possible to define new and more complex services or business processes which are implemented for example by means of Web service composition. Nevertheless, these kinds of languages are not suitable for use in the early stages of the development process of information systems. Special methodologies or techniques are therefore necessary to allow systems analysts to understand services from a business point of view, while facilitating the design and development of Web service composition. In this paper, we present a service-oriented approach to information system development that starts by identifying, through business modeling, the services required by the customers of a business, to make it possible to create a Web service composition model. This model will facilitate the transformation to specific languages for business process execution, thereby reducing the development efforts made in service-oriented applications. The method proposed is illustrated by means of a Web application for the management of medical images, which we have taken as a case study.

Reliable Web Services Composition: An MDD Approach

“…The challenge being ensuring the compliance between the specification and the resulting application. Software engineering methods (e.g., [4], [5], [6], [7]) today can help to ensure this compliance, particularly when information systems include several sometimes complex business processes calling Web services or legacy applications exported as services.…”

“…Modeling a Services' Based Application Figure 2 shows SOD-M that defines a service oriented approach providing a set of guidelines to build services' based information systems (SIS) [6], [10]. Therefore, SOD-M proposes to use services as first-class objects for the whole process of the SIS development and it follows a Model Driven Architecture (MDA) [11] approach.…”

“…Service oriented development methodologies providing models, best practices, and reference architectures to build services' based applications mainly address functional aspects [4], [5], [6], [7], [8]. Non-functional aspects concerning services' and application's "semantics", often expressed as requirements and constraints in general purpose methodologies, are not fully considered or they are added once the application has been implemented in order to ensure some level of reliability (e.g., data privacy, exception handling, atomicity, data persistence).…”

“…Therefore this paper presents πSOD-M, a model-driven method that extends the SOD-M [6] for building reliable services' based information systems (SIS).…”

“…This work (i) proposes to extend the SOD-M [6] method with the notion of A-Policy [9] for representing non-functional constraints associated to services' based applications; (ii) defines the π-PEWS meta-model providing guidelines for expressing the composition and the A-policies; and finally, (iii) defines model to model transformation rules for generating the π-PEWS model of a reliable services' composition starting from the extended services' composition model; and, model to text transformations for generating the corresponding implementation. As will be shown within our environment implementing these meta models and rules, one may represent both systems' cross-cutting aspects (e.g., exception handling for describing what to do when a service is not available, recovery, persistence aspects) and constraints associated to services, that must be respected for using them (e.g., the fact that a service requires an authentication protocol for executing a method).…”