A Semantic Rule and Event Driven Approach for Agile Decision-Centric Business Process Management (Invited Paper)

The growing importance of Web-based service organizations and agile enterprise service networks creates a need for the optimization of semi- or unstructured, decision-centric service processes. These decision-centric processes often contain more event-driven and situation-aware behavior, more non-standard knowledge intensive cases and event-driven routings, and more variability and agility than traditional processes. Consequently, systems supporting these decision-centric service processes require much more degrees of freedom than standard BPM systems. While pure syntactic BPM languages such as OASIS WS-BPEL and OMG BPMN addresses the industry's need for standard service orchestration semantics they provide only limited expressiveness to describe complex decision logic and conditional event-driven reaction logic. In this paper we propose a heterogenous service-oriented integration of rules (decision rules and complex event processing reaction rules) into BPM to describe rule-based business processes. This leads to a declarative rule-based Semantic BPM (SBPM) approach, which aims at agile and adaptive business process execution including enforcement of nonfunctional SLA properties of business services via rules.