A Conceptual Framework for Composition in Business Process Management

In this work, we present a conceptual framework for deriving executable business process models from high-level, graphical business process models based on the paradigm of Service-Oriented Architectures and Semantic Web technology. We hereby envision a direct, but implicit link from a business analyst's view on a process model to its execution driven by an IT system. This linkage enables the derivation of an execution-level model for newly created business process models as well as adaptation of the execution model after reengineering processes, possibly under certain re-design goals (such as quality, cost, execution time, flexibility, or others). The framework includes a component architecture and an algorithm that describes how to combine executable artifacts, such as (Semantic) Web services, in order to find an implementation that matches a given business process model. An extensible set of criteria can be used for validating the composition.