Modeling, verification and change management of Service-based Business Processes

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) paradigm and web service technologies are essential enablers for organizations to cooperate or collaborate with each other. The business processes of such organizations are referred to as service-based business processes (SBP). To manage SBPs in their dynamic context, it is vital that the complex dependencies among the internal business process and the exposed external services are correctly analyzed and modeled.This work provides solutions for the challenging issues of modeling, verification, and change management of SBPs. Different from existing approaches in the research areas of business process management and service management, this Ph.D. research emphasizes the dependencies not only between the internal business process and involved services of an SBP but also between/among their components (e.g., activities, data, and operations). Due to the dependencies between/among the activities and data elements of the internal business process of an SBP, there could be complex control flow and data flow structures which make the SBP modeling and verification challenging. Due to the dependencies between the internal business process and services involved in an SBP, changes may propagate between them in a cascading manner which makes the change management of SBPs challenging. To deal with this issue, it is necessary to develop a formal model for modeling SBPs at first. Then the correctness properties of SBP should be identified, and corresponding verification methods should be proposed.Finally, for handling changes in SBPs, the change types should be identified, and the change propagation must be under control. A Petri net based model is proposed for modeling SBPs. Based on the SBP model, a set of correctness properties of SBP are identified, and the verification methods are developed accordingly. A collection of SBP change patterns are identified and classified for translating and implementing changes. With the help of the SBP model, correctness verification, andthe change patterns, a change management framework is proposed for managing changes, in particular, the change propagation in SBPs.