A Rule-based Middleware for Business Process Execution

Abstract. While past research in service oriented computing has focused on the fairly static functional description and the operators of services the dynamic and flexible composition and collaboration of services in business processes in style of semi-autonomous multi-agent systems has not been as thoroughly explored. Executable business process description languages such as BPEL provide only limited expressiveness to describe (business) decision logic and conditional reaction logic. In this paper we propose a rule-based representation approach to describe service-oriented business processes and implement a distributed execution middleware for such rule-based process specifications using rule engines as execution environments which are deployed as distributed agents / web-based inference services. This declarative rule-based approach which allows for semi-autonomous decisions and reactions within service-based business process execution has the potential to profoundly change the way IT...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: MKWI
• Authors: Adrian Paschke, Alexander Kozlenkov
• Keywords: Business, Business Processes, Declarative Rule-based Approach, MKWI 2008, Semi-autonomous Multi-agent Systems