Supporting business process fragmentation while maintaining operational semantics

Globalization and the increase of competitive pressures created the need for agility in business processes, including the ability to outsource, offshore, or otherwise distribute its once-centralized business processes or parts thereof. Therefore, there is a growing need for the ability to fragment one’s business processes in an agile manner, and be able to distribute and wire these fragments so that their combined execution recreates the function of the original process. Additionally, this needs to be done in a networked environment, which is where ‘Service Oriented Architecture’ plays a vital role. This work describes how to identify, create, and execute process fragments without loosing the operational semantics of the original process models. It does so within the framework of the Web services stack of standards, BPEL in particular. Doctoral dissertation, Institute of Architecture of Application Systems (IAAS), University of Suttgart.