Actor Based Business Process Automation via Intelligent Business Objects

Business processes are a vital part of every company. But, executing business processes with conventional business process engines is complex, and so people rely on services such as email, where processes naturally emerge from the users' interactions. Instead of relying on the typical centralized and monolithic architecture of business process engines, this work shows, that a decentralized approach utilizing the Actor Model and Intelligent Business Objects (IBOs) is also feasible. Using the Actor Model, the process engine is distributed on several smaller independent actors, which enables a high flexibility. But instead of needing to store process configurations on actors to execute a process, the process configuration is stored in an Intelligent Business Object, which is passed around by the actors for each process instance. As a proof-of-concept, a prototype has been developed.