Reference Models for Saas Oriented Business Workflow Management Systems

SaaS(Software as a Service) has recently made a great impact on the software industry and changed the traditional lifetime of software. To obtain the benefit of SaaS, more and more software products have been converted into SaaS model, including business workflow management systems (BWfMS). Compared with the traditional BWfMSs, SaaS oriented BWfMSs introduce a new set of features which demand a new architectural design for SaaS oriented BWfMSs. Although several SaaS oriented BWfMSs have been developed, a study from an architectural perspective for SaaS oriented BWfMSs is still missing. The main contributions of this paper are: 1) according to the four SaaS maturity levels, it depicts four different scenarios where SaaS oriented BWfMSs work, 2) based on the four different scenarios, it proposes a reference model for SaaS oriented BWfMSs at each SaaS maturity level; 3) to validate the feasibility of the proposed reference model, it implements a specific BWfMS named WAAS.