Business Activities in an Industrial Context

Recent developments in IT industry lead to the notion of a Service, as an abstraction for an encapsulated business activity, hidden behind a well-defined interface. This abstraction fosters the view of complex business activities, as interactions between Services, allowing for an agile business activity modification. Furthermore, a breakdown of the monolithic business activity, into cooperating services, enables a simpler identification of Service’s capabilities, needed to accomplish given business goal. This fosters a clearer view of the overall process, in regard to outsourcing opportunities for external allocation of Services. The description of Services and collaborations between them, leads to the definition of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). In our understanding of SOA, a business activity is a set of messages being exchanged between Services, to enable the achievement of a common business goal. To allow for a correct business activity execution, well-defined choreography of, and coordination between, participating Services is necessary. To enable the coordination, the participants (Services) of a business activity have to exchange messages, representing the coordination flow. Thus, the services are being controlled by a coordination protocol. It is not advisable to create a coordination protocol from scratch, due to the large number of pitfalls concealed in this undertaking. An amount of well understood and researched protocols exists, ready for usage during business activity coordination. The utilization of standardized protocols raises the safety of the resulting system. Nevertheless, it is a non-trivial task to identify the appropriate protocols and use them as distributed building blocks for the emphasized business tasks. In this paper we show an approach to business activity modelling, with emphasis on identification of Services, messages being exchanged between them, collaboration scenarios and coordination protocols to be considered for the fulfilment of those scenarios. The modelling technique has been developed during business process analysis at Lufthansa Technik AG. An airframe related components overhaul process has been researched, in order to advise the concerned department, on application of loosely coupled systems. The analysis provides a basis for the inception of a SOA-based system, for the handling of airframe related components. The presented technique is not limited to the aerospace industry, but constitutes a generic approach to Service-Oriented Modelling. The main focus of this technique is the transformation from traditional, activity-based model, towards a model based upon message exchange between the participating Services. Further transition leads to the identification of collaboration patterns involved in the business activity. Given those patterns it is possible, to prove the applicability of standardized coordination protocols to the particular collaboration. We derive a methodology for structural approach to the management of business activities in SOA context, based on our experience gathered during the described analysis.