Monitoring Assertion-Based Business Processes

Business processes that span organizational borders describe the interaction between multiple parties working towards a common objective. They also express business rules that govern the behavior of the process and account for expressing changes reflecting new business objectives and new market situations. We developed a service request language and support framework that allow users to formulate their requests against standard business processes. In this paper, we extend the approach by presenting a framework capable of automatically associating business rules with relevant processes involved in a user request. This framework plans and monitors the execution of the request and assertions against services underlying these processes. Definitions and classifications of business rules (named assertions in the paper) are given together with an assertion language for expressing them. The framework is able to handle the nondeterminism typical for service-oriented computing environments and it is based on the interleaving of planning and execution. Interestingly, the language is able to express both functional and non-functional aspects of the assertions.