Controlled Flexibility in Business Processes Defined for Service Compositions

Business process modeling and enactment approaches for services compositions provide a way to coordinate the activities performed by de-centralized entities such as web services. As business needs change, the defined processes supporting the business also need to change and adapt, giving rise to the need for flexible business processes. However, a service composition is a collaborative environment where the service providers, consumers as well as the aggregator have business goals to achieve. Safeguarding such goals can be a daunting task upon numerous runtime modifications to business processes, but it is necessary to ensure the viability of the composition with respect to the business goals of all the parties. Therefore the flexibility needs to be controlled but without unnecessary restrictions. In this paper we propose a novel architectural approach to model, enact and manage business processes and their changes based on explicitly represented service relationships of a service composition.