SERVICE ORIENTED POLICY BASED BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT

Enterprise applications should respond to the challenges of complexity and variability that modern business is facing nowadays. Business processes and rules are the base of the enterprise applications; they should be managed in a manner that provides more agility. Agility means the ability to adapt to changes. Processes and rules embedded in the application limit the flexibility of meeting the changes. On the other hand Service oriented architecture (SOA) provides an effective solution for dynamic business situations by composing web services components. In this context an SOA framework combining business process management system (BPMS) and business rules management system (BRMS) is proposed in this paper. This framework codes neither business process nor the business rules in the application is proposed in this paper. It instead puts the process under the control of a business process management system (BPMS) and the rules or decision logic under the control of a policy based management system (BRMS). It doesn t only separate the process and rules from the application, it also separates the continuously changing decision logic from the process logic. The BRMS is policy based where related rules are grouped into policies; this approach provides more agility and better measurement for the effectiveness of the policies that an organization applies. A software bases on the proposed framework was developed and tested against the main quality aspects of performance, availability, testability, Interoperability, modifiahility and reliability. Scenarios were scripted and tested to measure these quality aspects. The results of these scenarios quantify the quality measures and prove the architecture quality.