Business Process Enforcement Using Harmonized Messaging Technology

Ma, Dat (2007). Business Process Enforcement Using Harmonized Messaging Technology PhD Thesis, School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering , University of Queensland.

       
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Author Ma, Dat
Thesis Title Business Process Enforcement Using Harmonized Messaging Technology
School, Centre or Institute School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering
Institution University of Queensland
Publication date 2007
Thesis type PhD Thesis
Supervisor Professor Maria Orlowska
Abstract/Summary Business Process Management (or BPM) has emerged recently as one of the most prominent technologies in enterprise systems. Generally, BPM aims to provide business process modelling, enactment, and monitoring. BPM attempts to create general frameworks, which avoid the "hard-coded" approach to application integration. It leverages the logic of business processes in the hands of process stakeholders, by abstracting from the data and application implementation details. However, despite the interest of various parties and the development of the technology, BPM solutions have not always delivered successfully. There reside many challenges and difficulties in BPM, which include the scalability, volatility, autonomy, heterogeneity, reliability, and security issues. A wide range of information technologies has been proposed to respond to these issues, but many limitations and challenges still exist; particularly, providing process support for collaborative business processes that are characterised by autonomous processes, asynchronous business activities, and message-based process communication. This thesis is motivated by the requirement to build a new approach for BPM to tackle the challenges of collaborative processes. We propose to integrate Messaging Oriented Middlewares and Rule-based technology into a new so-called Harmonized Messaging Technology (or HMT). The HMT utilises a messaging mechanism empowered by rules for supporting collaborative business processes. In particular, the HMT is intended to bridge the gap between the communication-oriented approaches and rule-based approaches for process management. The technology considers the abstraction of the process logic and the automation of the process management through an ordered flow of messages. In this thesis, we propose a temporal first-order language, which is called Harmonized Messaging Calculus and forms the formal foundation for rules governing the business process execution in HMT. For verification purpose, we consider the correctness criteria for such HMT rules, which help to avoid inconsistencies and unexpected behaviour in executing HMT process models. In addition, this thesis will present the architecture of the systems, which manage business processes through HMT. The functionality of HMT in process modelling and enactment is also investigated. Finally, the flexibility of HMT process models in supporting the new functionality is discussed. We conclude the thesis with the indication of directions for future work, which focus on the issues related to the deployment of HMT. In particular, we raise issues in design interfaces, analysis tools, audit trail data, transactions support, and security.

 
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Created: Fri, 21 Nov 2008, 16:16:39 EST