Behavior-consistent Composition of Business Processes from Internal and External Services

E-business processes are typically developed by composing internal processes and external processes offered by service providers. Whereas e-service integration has received considerable interest recently, the relationship between the behavior of the composite process and the behavior of the constituting service processes has not yet been thoroughly investigated. It is natural to expect that the behaviors of the composite process and the service processes are related as follows: (1) The composite process synchronizes the execution of activities from different service processes.(2) The composite process provides a complete overview of the service processes in that business transactions can be tracked "observed" over their entire life time across all services.(3) If an activity can be invoked according to the composite process, it can be successfully invoked in the respective service process.(4) The description of the composite process, focussing on coordination, abstracts from local details as far as possible. Based on these requirements, the paper introduces formal correctness criteria for business-process composition and sketches an accompanying algorithm that determines a "behavior-consistent" composition.