A Service-Oriented Architecture Design of Decision-Aware Information Systems: Decision as a Service - (Short Paper)

Separating the decision modelling concern from the processes modelling concern has gained significant support in literature over the past few years, as incorporating both concerns into a single model has shown to impair the scalability, maintainability, flexibility and understandability of both processes and decisions. Most notably the introduction of the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard by the Object Management Group has provided a suitable solution for externalising decisions from processes. This paper introduces a systematic way of tackling the separation of the decision modelling concern from process modelling by providing a Decision as a Service (DaaS) layered Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) which approaches decisions as externalised services that processes need to invoke on demand in order to obtain the decision outcome. Additionally, the benefits of the DaaS design on process-decision modelling are discussed in terms of scalability, maintainability, flexibility and understandability.

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