A Policy Driven Approach for Service-Oriented Business Rule Management

In modern business environments, business processes and rules frequently require changes according to intensive competition and a rapidly evolving technical infrastructure. However, traditional business logic embedded in enterprise applications is difficult to change to adapt to flexible business situations. On the other hand, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) provides an effective solution for dynamic business process flexibility by composing Web Service components. In this paper, we propose a policy-based approach to transform and enforce high-level business policy into low-level service policy. In our approach, the policy hierarchy is structured as the group policy and the service policy for specific Web Services. The group policy describes the abstract, high-level business requirements for a small set of rules, while the low-level service policy can be created automatically via policy extension and implemented dynamically at run-time.