eFlow: an Open, Flexible and Configurable Approach to Service Composition

The Web is rapidly becoming the platform through which many companies deliver services to businesses and individual customers. E-Services are typically delivered point-to-point; however, the e-service environment creates the opportunity for providing value-added, integrated services, which are delivered by composing existing e-services, possibly offered by different companies. In order to enable organizations to pursue this business opportunity we are developing eFlow, a platform that supports the specification, enactment, and management of composite e-services, modeled as processes that are enacted by a service process engine. In this talk I will present the eFlow model and system, which provides a flexible, configurable, and open approach to service composition. In fact, eFlow provides an adaptive and dynamic process model, that allows processes to transparently adapt to changes in the environment, to customize service execution according to the customers' needs, and to cope with exceptional situations. In addition, the model and the system are configurable, so that applications running on devices with limited storage space and computing power can download a version of eFlow that only includes needed features and that has a smaller footprint with respect to the complete version. Finally, eFlow is an open system, in that users can replace default components with the one that best suit their needs, to be able to interact with a given e-service environment. These characteristics allow the system to cope with the highly dynamic and heterogeneous e-service environment. Session 3: Integrating Process Management