Authors:
Roy Oberhauser
and
Sebastian Stigler
Affiliation:
Computer Science Department, Aalen University, Germany
Keyword(s):
Business Process Modeling, Workflow Management Systems, Microservices, Service Orchestration, Agent Systems, Semantic Technology, Declarative Programming.
Abstract:
Businesses and software development processes alike are being challenged by the digital transformation
trend. Business processes are increasingly being automated yet are expected to be agile. Current business
process modeling is typically labor-intensive and results in rigid process models, with larger process models
unable to cope with all possible process variations and enactment circumstances. In software development,
microservices have become a popular software architectural style for partitioning business logic into finegrained
services that can be rapidly and individually developed and (re)deployed while accessed via
lightweight protocols, resulting in many more services and a much more dynamic service landscape. Thus, a
more dynamic form of modeling, integration, and orchestration of microservices with business processes is
needed. This paper describes agile business process modeling with Microflows, an automatic lightweight
declarative approach for the workflow-centric orches
tration of semantically-annotated microservices using
agent-based clients, graph-based methods, and the lightweight semantic vocabularies JSON-LD and Hydra.
A case study shows how Microflow constraints can be automatically extracted from existing Business
Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) files, how Microflow execution log file process mining can be used to
extract BPMN models, and demonstrates an automated error recovery capability during enactment.
(More)