BP-Mon

Abstract

A Business Process (BP for short) consists of some business activities undertaken by one or more organizations in pursuit of some particular goal. It often interacts with other BPs of the same or other organizations and the software implementing it is rather complex. Two complementary instruments facilitate the design, development, and management of this complex software. The first is the use of standards . In particular, the recent BPEL standard (Business Process Execution Language [5]) provides an XML-based language to describe the operational logic and execution flow of the BP, as well as the interfaces it exposes to other BPs. A BP specification written in BPEL can be automatically compiled into an actual code that implements the BP, and can be executed on a BPEL server. The second instrument is the use of supporting BP management tools for (1) designing the BP BPEL specifications, (2) analyzing the design, (3) monitoring the BPs at run time, and (4) analyzing, posteriorly, the process execution traces (logs). Together they provide an essential infrastructure for companies to design business processes, optimize them, reduce operational costs, and ultimately increase competitiveness.