Research On The Mechanism Of Lightweight Business Process Interaction

In modern enterprise information systems, the combination of SOA and BPM drives the development of Process-Aware Information System.Various standard business process modeling languages emerged and they usually focus on how to define a business process model precisely and how to map each process activity to a service or an executable program code fragment. Finally, theses business process models will be deployed,executed and monitored in an automated fashion. These works aim at satisfying the everyday business requirements in enterprise. However,existing business process management technologies mainly focus on highly detailed predefined behavioral patterns and strict control over task execution, leading to high complexity. And many researchers have stated that even well designed process models still may not be used in practice because of lack of acceptance from end users or lack of flexibility to satisfy situational and spontaneous needs in enterprise. That is, a "long tail” of business processes can be observed with respect to the requirements of end users.To tackle this "long tail",the current trend is to guide ordinary users in specifying their needs and creating business processes for themselves.Comparing with traditional BPM business process standard, these processes created by end users usually are less complex and more situational and personalized. The services used by these processes are usually in REST fashion and do not utilize Web Service based on WSDL and SOAP. Therefore, these processes are named "lightweight" business processes.The research object of this thesis is this kind of lightweight business processes. The research context is the actual business scenario in enterprise information systems. And also we especially pay attention on the how to interact with lightweight business process in mobile environment. The main research problems in this thesis are: First, how to build lightweight business process and how to describe the interaction between lightweight business process and standard business process.Second, how to interact with lightweight business process in mobile environment and how to optimize our approach according to mobile context.To solve these two research problems, three main contributions are given in this thesis:(1) On the basis of Event-driven Process Chain(EPC), we propose a novel lightweight event-driven process chain, named lightEPC. This model has four advantages compared with other lightweight enterprise mashup research works: First, lightEPC has various control flow structure but is end-user oriented. End users can build lightEPC model implicitly following our designed modeling wizard, and neither in the style of drag-and-drop nor in the style of writing process code; Second, enterprise usually wrap services into composable widget in a WYSIWYG fashion.However it pay more attention on the UI rather than the business logic.Third, lightEPC works in an event-reactive style; Fourth, we allow end users interact with standard business processes using lightEPC.(2) We give formal definition of lightEPC and analyze the error patterns based on this definition. We propose an error pattern named RLP which usually appears in the dataflow of lightEPC. Furthermore, we give corresponding error detect algorithm. We also design a whole system covering modeling, verification and execution of lightEPC, and the prototype is demonstrated.(3) We research how to use lightEPC in mobile environment and improve our work to satisfy the requirements of end users in mobile context. We also optimize the interactions between mobile devices and the lightEPC server using a proxy server and rule based approach. Finally,we evaluate our work from two aspects: performance and usability. Two kinds of different experiments are setup, conducted and analyzed.To sum up, we give a whole work about the interaction between standard business process and lightweight business process.