A Process Convergence Approach for Crossover Services based on Message Flow Partition and Merging

Abstract

Crossover service is a new type of services in the modern service industry, which aims to provide users with value-added services through converging services across the boundaries of organizations, industries, value chains, and spaces. Convergence is an essential topic in the evolution from traditional services to crossover services. Where and how to converge to achieve user goals is a challenging issue in the convergence process. Towards this issue, in this paper, we focus our attention on the process-level convergence and propose a framework to converge business processes with consideration of the effect of involved roles and goals. In our framework, convergence rules and corresponding convergence operations are defined based on message flow partition and merging. Finally, a case study of a crossover service by converging services from a travel domain and an insurance domain, and an experiment conducted on five use cases, are presented to show the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed approach.