Patterns for Process-Oriented Integration in Service-Oriented Architectures

Service-oriented architectures are increasingly used in the context of business processes, but the proven practices for the integration of services and processes are not well explained so far. For the integration of services and processes many different concerns, ranging from technical to architectural to businessrelated concerns, must be considered, and combinations of these concerns that are well working in a given architecture are not obvious. In this paper we tackle this problem by presenting patterns for process-oriented integration of services in a service-oriented architecture. The patterns follow a general conceptual distinction into a macroflow and a microflow level, distinguishing long-running, business processes from short-running, technical processes. The architectural pattern PROCESS-BASED INTEGRATION ARCHITECTURE guides the design of a generic architecture based on this distinction, and it is refined by a number of design patterns which depict individual design decisions within the scope of this architectural pattern.