BPSM: An Adaptive Platform for Managing Business Process Solutions

The growing number of business process solutions demands the need of platforms enabling developers to build management applications in a more efficient manner. This paper describes an adaptive platform, called BPSM (Business Process Solution Management), for managing business process solutions. A business process solution touches many enterprise entities: multiple business processes, different organizations, various execution platforms, multiple trading partners, and constantly changing business context. To build platforms for business process solutions is difficult. To develop platforms for managing business process solutions poses an even greater challenge. The BPSM platform is our response to this challenge by creating an adaptive environment so that developers can leverage it to build management applications in the domain of business process solution management. The framework of BPSM will be presented in this paper, covering three kinds of decomposition for business process solution management: horizontal decomposition, vertical decomposition and grid decomposition. A language for management policy called Management Commitment Language (MCL) will be presented. This paper will also account why BPSM is a commitment-governed management (CGM) platform. The architectural framework of BPSM will be described in the form of Q&A style and architectural patterns. Finally, a BPSM-based Supply Chain Management system is presented for illustrating the strength of this platform.