Ad-hoc Management Capabilities for Distributed Business Processes

Advanced business processes are mostly distributed and require highly flexible management capabilities. In such scenarios, process parts often leave their initiator’s direct sphere of influence – while management requires both monitoring as well as instant reaction capabilities anytime during the overall execution of the process. However, realizing such functions is often difficult, e.g. due to the heterogeneity and temporal disconnectivity of participating execution systems. Therefore, this contribution proposes a two-tier concept for monitoring and controlling distributed processes by representing a process management system as a manageable resource according to the WSDM standard. Based on a minimal shared model of management capabilities it allows to define customized events and processing rules for influencing business processes executed on a remote (and even on a temporarily disconnected) process management system. Applicability is demonstrated by a scenario-based evaluation on distributed WS-BPEL and XPDL processes.